Into The Wild

[SEE PIC ‘CHRIS.JPG’][See Map1] Jon Krakauer INTO THE WILD

For Linda

AUTHOR’S NOTE In April 1992, a young man from a well-to-do East Coast family hitchhiked toAlaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. Four monthslater his decomposed body was found by a party of moose hunters. Shortly after the discovery of the corpse, I was asked by the editor of Outsidemagazine to report on the puzzling circumstances of the boy’s death. His nameturned out to be Christopher Johnson McCandless. He’d grown up, I learned, inan affluent suburb of Washington, D.C., where he’d excelled academically andhad been an elite athlete. Immediately after graduating, with honors, from Emory University in thesummer of 1990, McCandless dropped out of sight. He changed his name, gavethe entire balance of a twenty-four-thousand-dollar savings account to charity,abandoned his car and most of his possessions, burned all the cash in his wallet.And then he invented a new life for himself, taking up residence at the raggedmargin of our society, wandering across North America in search of raw,transcendent experience. His family had no idea where he was or what hadbecome of him until his remains turned up in Alaska. Working on a tight deadline, I wrote a nine-thousand-word article, which ranin the January 1993 issue of the magazine, but my fascination with McCandlessremained long after that issue of Outside was replaced on the newsstands bymore current journalistic fare. I was haunted by the particulars of the boy’sstarvation and by vague, unsettling parallels between events in his life and thosein my own. Unwilling to let McCandless go, I spent more than a year retracing theconvoluted path that led to his death in the Alaska taiga, chasing down details ofhis peregrinations with an interest that bordered on obsession. In trying to un-derstand McCandless, I inevitably came to reflect on other, larger subjects aswell: the grip wilderness has on the American imagination, the allure high-riskactivities hold for young men of a certain mind, the complicated, highly chargedbond that exists between fathers and sons. The result of this meandering inquiryis the book now before you. I won’t claim to be an impartial biographer. McCandless’s strange tale strucka personal note that made a dispassionate rendering of the tragedy impossible.Through most of the book, I have tried—and largely succeeded, I think—tominimize my authorial presence. But let the reader be warned: I interruptMcCandless’s story with fragments of a narrative drawn from my own youth. I doso in the hope that my experiences will throw some oblique light on the enigmaof Chris McCandless. He was an extremely intense young man and possessed a streak of stubbornidealism that did not mesh readily with modern existence. Long captivated by

the writing of Leo Tolstoy, McCandless particularly admired how the greatnovelist had forsaken a life of wealth and privilege to wander among the desti-tute. In college McCandless began emulating Tolstoy’s asceticism and moral rigorto a degree that first astonished, and then alarmed, those who were close tohim. When the boy headed off into the Alaska bush, he entertained no illusionsthat he was trekking into a land of milk and honey; peril, adversity, and Tol-stoyan renunciation were precisely what he was seeking. And that is what hefound, in abundance. For most of the sixteen-week ordeal, nevertheless, McCandless more thanheld his own. Indeed, were it not for one or two seem- ingly insignificant blunders, he would have walked out of the woods in August1992 as anonymously as he had walked into them in April. Instead, his innocentmistakes turned out to be pivotal and irreversible, his name became the stuff oftabloid headlines, and his bewildered family was left clutching the shards of afierce and painful love. A surprising number of people have been affected by the story of ChrisMcCandless’s life and death. In the weeks and months following the publicationof the article in Outside, it generated more mail than any other article in themagazines history. This correspondence, as one might expect, reflected sharplydivergent points of view: Some readers admired the boy immensely for hiscourage and noble ideals; others fulminated that he was a reckless idiot, awacko, a narcissist who perished out of arrogance and stupidity—and wasundeserving of the considerable media attention he received. My convictionsshould be apparent soon enough, but I will leave it to the reader to form his orher own opinion of Chris McCandless. JON KRAKAUER SEATTLE APRIL 1995

[See Map2] CHAPTER ONE THE ALASKA INTERIORApril 27th, 1992Greetings from Fairbanks! This is the last you shall hear from me Wayne.Arrived here 2 days ago. It was very difficult to catch rides in the YukonTerritory. But I finally got here. Please return all mail I receive to the sender. It might be a very long timebefore I return South. If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hearfrom me again I want you to know you ‘re a great man. I now walk into thewild. Alex. PPOSTCARD RECEIVED BY WAYNE WESTERBERGIN CARTHAGE, SOUTH DAKOTA Jim Gallien had driven four miles out of Fairbanks when he spotted thehitchhiker standing in the snow beside the road, thumb raised high, shivering inthe gray Alaska dawn. He didn’t appear to be very old: eighteen, maybe nineteenat most. A rifle protruded from the young man’s backpack, but he looked friendlyenough; a hitchhiker with a Remington semiautomatic isn’t the sort of thing thatgives motorists pause in the forty-ninth state. Gallien steered his truck onto theshoulder and told the kid to climb in. The hitchhiker swung his pack into the bed of the Ford and introduced himselfas Alex. “Alex?” Gallien responded, fishing for a last name. “Just Alex,” the young man replied, pointedly rejecting the bait. Five feetseven or eight with a wiry build, he claimed to be twenty-four years old and saidhe was from South Dakota. He explained that he wanted a ride as far as the edgeof Denali National Park, where he intended to walk deep into the bush and “liveoff the land for a few months.” Gallien, a union electrician, was on his way to Anchorage, 240 miles beyondDenali on the George Parks Highway; he told Alex he’d drop him off wherever hewanted. Alex’s backpack looked as though it weighed only twenty-five or thirtypounds, which struck Gallien—an accomplished hunter and woodsman—as animprobably light load for a stay of several months in the back-country, especiallyso early in the spring. “He wasn’t carrying anywhere near as much food and gearas you’d expect a guy to be carrying for that kind of trip,” Gallien recalls. The sun came up. As they rolled down from the forested ridges above the

Tanana River, Alex gazed across the expanse of windswept muskeg stretching tothe south. Gallien wondered whether he’d picked up one of those crackpots fromthe lower forty-eight who come north to live out ill-considered Jack Londonfantasies. Alaska has long been a magnet for dreamers and misfits, people whothink the unsullied enormity of the Last Frontier will patch all the holes in theirlives. The bush is an unforgiving place, however, that cares nothing for hope orlonging. “People from Outside,” reports Gallien in a slow, sonorous drawl, “they’llpick up a copy of Alaska magazine, thumb through it, get to thinkin’ ‘Hey, I’mgoin’ to get on up there, live off the land, go claim me a piece of the good life.’But when they get here and actually head out into the bush—well, it isn’t like themagazines make it out to be. The rivers are big and fast. The mosquitoes eat youalive. Most places, there aren’t a lot of animals to hunt. Livin’ in the bush isn’tno picnic.” It was a two-hour drive from Fairbanks to the edge of Denali Park. The morethey talked, the less Alex struck Gallien as a nutcase. He was congenial andseemed well educated. He peppered Gallien with thoughtful questions about thekind of small game that live in the country, the kinds of berries he could eat—”that kind of thing.” Still, Gallien was concerned. Alex admitted that the only food in his pack wasa ten-pound bag of rice. His gear seemed exceedingly minimal for the harshconditions of the interior, which in April still lay buried under the wintersnowpack. Alex’s cheap leather hiking boots were neither waterproof nor wellinsulated. His rifle was only .22 caliber, a bore too small to rely on if he ex-pected to kill large animals like moose and caribou, which he would have to eatif he hoped to remain very long in the country. He had no ax, no bug dope, nosnowshoes, no compass. The only navigational aid in his possession was atattered state road map he’d scrounged at a gas station. A hundred miles out of Fairbanks the highway begins to climb into thefoothills of the Alaska Range. As the truck lurched over a bridge across theNenana River, Alex looked down at the swift current and remarked that he wasafraid of the water. “A year ago down in Mexico,” he told Gallien, “I was out onthe ocean in a canoe, and I almost drowned when a storm came up.” A little later Alex pulled out his crude map and pointed to a dashed red linethat intersected the road near the coal-mining town of Healy. It represented aroute called the Stampede Trail. Seldom traveled, it isn’t even marked on mostroad maps of Alaska. On Alex’s map, nevertheless, the broken line meanderedwest from the Parks Highway for forty miles or so before petering out in themiddle of trackless wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. This, Alex announced toGallien, was where he intended to go. Gallien thought the hitchhiker’s scheme was foolhardy and tried repeatedlyto dissuade him: “I said the hunting wasn’t easy where he was going, that hecould go for days without killing any game. When that didn’t work, I tried toscare him with bear stories. I told him that a twenty-two probably wouldn’t doanything to a grizzly except make him mad. Alex didn’t seem too worried. Tilclimb a tree’ is all he said. So I explained that trees don’t grow real big in that

part of the state, that a bear could knock down one of them skinny little blackspruce without even trying. But he wouldn’t give an inch. He had an answer foreverything I threw at him.” Gallien offered to drive Alex all the way to Anchorage, buy him some decentgear, and then drive him back to wherever he wanted to go. “No, thanks anyway,” Alex replied, “I’ll be fine with what I’ve got.” Gallien asked whether he had a hunting license. “Hell, no,” Alex scoffed. “How I feed myself is none of the government’sbusiness. Fuck their stupid rules.” When Gallien asked whether his parents or a friend knew what he was up to—whether there was anyone who would sound the alarm if he got into trouble andwas overdue—Alex answered calmly that no, nobody knew of his plans, that infact he hadn’t spoken to his family in nearly two years. “I’m absolutely positive,”he assured Gallien, “I won’t run into anything I can’t deal with on my own.” “There was just no talking the guy out of it,” Gallien remembers. “He wasdetermined. Real gung ho. The word that comes to mind is excited. He couldn’twait to head out there and get started.” Three hours out of Fairbanks, Gallien turned off the highway and steered hisbeat-up 4x4 down a snow-packed side road. For the first few miles the StampedeTrail was well graded and led past cabins scattered among weedy stands ofspruce and aspen. Beyond the last of the log shacks, however, the road rapidlydeteriorated. Washed out and overgrown with alders, it turned into a rough,unmaintained track. In summer the road here would have been sketchy but passable; now it wasmade unnavigable by a foot and a half of mushy spring snow. Ten miles from thehighway, worried that he’d get stuck if he drove farther, Gallien stopped his rigon the crest of a low rise. The icy summits of the highest mountain range inNorth America gleamed on the southwestern horizon. Alex insisted on giving Gallien his watch, his comb, and what he said was allhis money: eighty-five cents in loose change. “I don’t want your money,” Gallienprotested, “and I already have a watch.” “If you don’t take it, I’m going to throw it away,” Alex cheerfully retorted. “Idon’t want to know what time it is. I don’t want to know what day it is or whereI am. None of that matters.” Before Alex left the pickup, Gallien reached behind the seat, pulled out anold pair of rubber work boots, and persuaded the boy to take them. “They weretoo big for him,” Gallien recalls. “But I said, ‘Wear two pair of socks, and yourfeet ought to stay halfway warm and dry.’” “How much do I owe you?” “Don’t worry about it,” Gallien answered. Then he gave the kid a slip ofpaper with his phone number on it, which Alex carefully tucked into a nylonwallet. “If you make it out alive, give me a call, and I’ll tell you how to get the bootsback to me.” Gallien’s wife had packed him two grilled-cheese-and-tuna sandwiches and abag of corn chips for lunch; he persuaded the young hitchhiker to accept the

food as well. Alex pulled a camera from his backpack and asked Gallien to snap apicture of him shouldering his rifle at the trailhead. Then, smiling broadly, hedisappeared down the snow-covered track. The date was Tuesday, April 28,1992. Gallien turned the truck around, made his way back to the Parks Highway,and continued toward Anchorage. A few miles down the road he came to thesmall community of Healy, where the Alaska State Troopers maintain a post.Gallien briefly considered stopping and telling the authorities about Alex, thenthought better of it. “I figured he’d be OK,” he explains. “I thought he’dprobably get hungry pretty quick and just walk out to the highway. That’s whatany normal person would do.”

[See Map Page 8] CHAPTER TWO THE STAMPEDE TRAIL Jack London is King Alexander Supertramp May 1992 GRAFFITO CARVED INTO A PIECE OF WOOD DISCOVERED AT THE SITE OF CHRIS MCCANDLESS’S DEATH Dark spruce forest frowned on either side the frozen waterway. The treeshad been stripped by a recent wind of their white covering of frost, and theyseemed to lean toward each other, black and ominous, in the fading light. Avast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless,without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that ofsadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terriblethan any sadness—a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx,a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility. Itwas the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at thefutility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild. JACK LONDON, WHITE FANG On the northern margin of the Alaska Range, just before the hulking rampartsof Mt. McKinley and its satellites surrender to the low Kantishna plain, a series oflesser ridges, known as the Outer Range, sprawls across the flats like a rumpledblanket on an unmade bed. Between the flinty crests of the two outermostescarpments of the Outer Range runs an east-west trough, maybe five milesacross, carpeted in a boggy amalgam of muskeg, alder thickets, and veins ofscrawny spruce. Meandering through the tangled, rolling bottomland is theStampede Trail, the route Chris McCandless followed into the wilderness. The trail was blazed in the 1930s by a legendary Alaska miner named EarlPilgrim; it led to antimony claims he’d staked on Stampede Creek, above theClearwater Fork of the Toklat River. In 1961, a Fairbanks company, YutanConstruction, won a contract from the new state of Alaska (statehood havingbeen granted just two years earlier) to upgrade the trail, building it into a road

on which trucks could haul ore from the mine year-round. To house constructionworkers while the road was going in, Yutan purchased three junked buses,outfitted each with bunks and a simple barrel stove, and skidded them into thewilderness behind a D-9 Caterpillar. The project was halted in 1963: some fifty miles of road were eventuallybuilt, but no bridges were ever erected over the many rivers it transected, andthe route was shortly rendered impassable by thawing permafrost and seasonalfloods. Yutan hauled two of the buses back to the highway. The third bus wasleft about halfway out the trail to serve as backcountry shelter for hunters andtrappers. In the three decades since construction ended, much of the roadbedhas been obliterated by washouts, brush, and beaver ponds, but the bus is stillthere. A vintage International Harvester from the 1940s, the derelict vehicle islocated twenty-five miles west of Healy as the raven flies, rusting incongruouslyin the fireweed beside the Stampede Trail, just beyond the boundary of DenaliNational Park. The engine is gone. Several windows are cracked or missingaltogether, and broken whiskey bottles litter the floor. The green-and-whitepaint is badly oxidized. Weathered lettering indicates that the old machine wasonce part of the Fairbanks City Transit System: bus 142. These days it isn’tunusual for six or seven months to pass without the bus seeing a human visitor,but in early September 1992, six people in three separate parties happened tovisit the remote vehicle on the same afternoon. In 1980, Denali National Park was expanded to include the Kantishna Hills andthe northernmost cordillera of the Outer Range, but a parcel of low terrainwithin the new park acreage was omitted: a long arm of land known as the WolfTownships, which encompasses the first half of the Stampede Trail. Because thisseven-by-twenty-mile tract is surrounded on three sides by the protectedacreage of the national park, it harbors more than its share of wolf, bear,caribou, moose, and other game, a local secret that’s jealously guarded by thosehunters and trappers who are aware of the anomaly. As soon as moose seasonopens in the fall, a handful of hunters typically pays a visit to the old bus, whichsits beside the Sushana River at the westernmost end of the nonpark tract,within two miles of the park boundary. Ken Thompson, the owner of an Anchorage auto-body shop, Gordon Samel, hisemployee, and their friend Ferdie Swanson, a construction worker, set out forthe bus on September 6, 1992, stalking moose. It isn’t an easy place to reach.About ten miles past the end of the improved road the Stampede Trail crossesthe Teklanika River, a fast, icy stream whose waters are opaque with glacial till.The trail comes down to the riverbank just upstream from a narrow gorge,through which the Teklanika surges in a boil of white water. The prospect offording this /affe-colored torrent discourages most people from traveling anyfarther. Thompson, Samel, and Swanson, however, are contumacious Alaskans with aspecial fondness for driving motor vehicles where motor vehicles aren’t reallydesigned to be driven. Upon arriving at the Teklanika, they scouted the banksuntil they located a wide, braided section with relatively shallow channels, and

then they steered headlong into the flood. “I went first,” Thompson says. “The river was probably seventy-five feetacross and real swift. My rig is a jacked-up eighty-two Dodge four by four withthirty-eight-inch rubber on it, and the water was right up to the hood. At onepoint I didn’t think I’d get across. Gordon has a eight-thousand-pound winch onthe front of his rig; I had him follow right behind so he could pull me out if I wentout of sight.” Thompson made it to the far bank without incident, followed by Samel andSwanson in their trucks. In the beds of two of the pickups were light-weight all-terrain vehicles: a three-wheeler and a four-wheeler. They parked the big rigs ona gravel bar, unloaded the ATVs, and continued toward the bus in the smaller,more maneuverable machines. A few hundred yards beyond the river the trail disappeared into a series ofchest-deep beaver ponds. Undeterred, the three Alaskans dynamited theoffending stick dams and drained the ponds. Then they motored onward, up arocky creek bed and through dense alder thickets. It was late afternoon by thetime they finally arrived at the bus. When they got there, according toThompson, they found “a guy and a girl from Anchorage standing fifty feet away,looking kinda spooked.” Neither of them had been in the bus, but they’d been close enough to notice“a real bad smell from inside.” A makeshift signal flag—a red knitted leg warmerof the sort worn by dancers— was knotted to the end of an alder branch by thevehicle’s rear exit. The door was ajar, and taped to it was a disquieting note.Handwritten in neat block letters on a page torn from a novel by Nikolay Gogol,it read: S.O.S. I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TOHIKE OUT OF HERE I AM ALL ALONE, THIS IS NO JOKE. IN THE NAME OF GOD,PLEASE REMAIN TO SAVE ME. I AM OUT COLLECTING BERRIES CLOSE BY ANDSHALL RETURN THIS EVENING. THANK YOU, CHRIS MCCANDLESS. AUGUST? The Anchorage couple had been too upset by the implication of the note andthe overpowering odor of decay to examine the bus’s interior, so Samel steeledhimself to take a look. A peek through a window revealed a Remington rifle, aplastic box of shells, eight or nine paperback books, some torn jeans, cookingutensils, and an expensive backpack. In the very rear of the vehicle, on a jerry-built bunk, was a blue sleeping bag that appeared to have something or someoneinside it, although, says Samel, “it was hard to be absolutely sure. “I stood on a stump,” Samel continues, “reached through a back window, and gave the bag a shake. There was definitely something in it,but whatever it was didn’t weigh much. It wasn’t until I walked around to theother side and saw a head sticking out that I knew for certain what it was.” ChrisMcCandless had been dead for two and a half weeks. Samel, a man of strong opinions, decided the body should be evacuated rightaway. There wasn’t room on his or Thompson’s small machine to haul the deadperson out, however, nor was there space on the Anchorage couple’s ATV. A

short while later a sixth person appeared on the scene, a hunter from Healynamed Butch Killian. Because Killian was driving an Argo—a large amphibiouseight-wheeled ATV—Samel suggested that Killian evacuate the remains, butKillian declined, insisting it was a task more properly left to the Alaska StateTroopers. Killian, a coal miner who moonlights as an emergency medical technician forthe Healy Volunteer Fire Department, had a two-way radio on the Argo. When hecouldn’t raise anybody from where he was, he started driving back toward thehighway; five miles down the trail, just before dark, he managed to make con-tact with the radio operator at the Healy power plant. “Dispatch,” he reported,“this is Butch. You better call the troopers. There’s a man back in the bus by theSushana. Looks like he’s been dead for a while.” At eight-thirty the next morning, a police helicopter touched down noisilybeside the bus in a blizzard of dust and swirling aspen leaves. The troopers madea cursory examination of the vehicle and its environs for signs of foul play andthen departed. When they flew away, they took McCandless s remains, a camerawith five rolls of exposed film, the SOS note, and a diary—written across the lasttwo pages of a field guide to edible plants— that recorded the young man’s finalweeks in 113 terse, enigmatic entries. The body was taken to Anchorage, where an autopsy was performed at theScientific Crime Detection Laboratory. The remains were so badly decomposedthat it was impossible to determine exactly when McCandless had died, but thecoroner could find no sign of massive internal injuries or broken bones. Virtually no subcutaneous fat remained on the body, and the muscles hadwithered significantly in the days or weeks prior to death. At the time of theautopsy, McCandless’s remains weighed sixty-seven pounds. Starvation wasposited as the most probable cause of death. McCandless’s signature had been penned at the bottom of the SOS note, andthe photos, when developed, included many self-portraits. But because he hadbeen carrying no identification, the authorities didn’t know who he was, wherehe was from, or why he was there.

CHAPTER THREE CARTHAGE / wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wantedexcitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I feltin myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life. LEO TOLSTOY, “FAMILY HAPPINESS” PASSAGE HIGHLIGHTED IN ONE OF THE BOOKS FOUND WITH CHRIS MCCANDLESS’S REMAINS It should not be denied... that being footloose has always exhilarated us.It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression andlaw and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road hasalways led west. WALLACE STEGNER, THE AMERICAN WEST AS LIVING SPACE Carthage, South Dakota, population 274, is a sleepy little cluster of clapboardhouses, tidy yards, and weathered brick storefronts rising humbly from theimmensity of the northern plains, set adrift in time. Stately rows of cottonwoodsshade a grid of streets seldom disturbed by moving vehicles. There’s one groceryin town, one bank, a single gas station, a lone bar—the Cabaret, where WayneWesterberg is sipping a cocktail and chewing on a sweet cigar, remembering theodd young man he knew as Alex. The Cabaret’s plywood-paneled walls are hung with deer antlers, OldMilwaukee beer promos, and mawkish paintings of game birds taking flight.Tendrils of cigarette smoke rise from clumps of farmers in overalls and dustyfeed caps, their tired faces as grimy as coal miners’. Speaking in short, matter-of-fact phrases, they worry aloud over the fickle weather and fields of sunflowersstill too wet to cut, while above their heads Ross Perot s sneering visage flickersacross a silent television screen. In eight days the nation will elect Bill Clintonpresident. It’s been nearly two months now since the body of Chris McCandlessturned up in Alaska. “These are what Alex used to drink,” says Westerberg with a frown, swirlingthe ice in his White Russian. “He used to sit right there at the end of the bar andtell us these amazing stories of his travels. He could talk for hours. A lot of folks

here in town got pretty attached to old Alex. Kind of a strange deal whathappened to him.” Westerberg, a hyperkinetic man with thick shoulders and a black goatee,owns a grain elevator in Carthage and another one a few miles out of town butspends every summer running a custom combine crew that follows the harvestfrom Texas north to the Canadian border. In the fall of 1990, he was wrapping upthe season in north-central Montana, cutting barley for Coors and Anheuser-Busch. On the afternoon of September 10, driving out of Cut Bank after buyingsome parts for a malfunctioning combine, he pulled over for a hitchhiker, anamiable kid who said his name was Alex McCandless. McCandless was smallish with the hard, stringy physique of an itinerantlaborer. There was something arresting about the youngster’s eyes. Dark andemotive, they suggested a trace of exotic blood in his heritage—Greek, maybe,or Chippewa—and conveyed a vulnerability that made Westerberg want to takethe kid under his wing. He had the kind of sensitive good looks that women madea big fuss over, Westerberg imagined. His face had a strange elasticity: It wouldbe slack and expressionless one minute, only to twist suddenly into a gaping,oversize grin that distorted his features and exposed a mouthful of horsy teeth.He was nearsighted and wore steel-rimmed glasses. He looked hungry. Ten minutes after picking up McCandless, Westerberg stopped in the town ofEthridge to deliver a package to a friend. “He offered us both a beer,” saysWesterberg, “and asked Alex how long it’d been since he ate. Alex allowed howit’d been a couple of days. Said he’d kind of run out of money.” Overhearingthis, the friend s wife insisted on cooking Alex a big dinner, which he wolfeddown, and then he fell asleep at the table. McCandless had told Westerberg that his destination was Saco Hot Springs,240 miles to the east on U.S. Highway 2, a place he’d heard about from some“rubber tramps” (i.e., vagabonds who owned a vehicle; as distinguished from“leather tramps,” who lacked personal transportation and were thus forced tohitchhike or walk). Westerberg had replied that he could take McCandless onlyten miles down the road, at which point he would be turning north towardSunburst, where he kept a trailer near the fields he was cutting. By the timeWesterberg steered over to the shoulder to drop McCandless off, it was ten-thirtyat night and raining hard. “Jeeze,” Westerberg told him, “I hate to leave you outhere in the goddamn rain. You got a sleeping bag—why don’t you come on up toSunburst, spend the night in the trailer?” McCandless stayed with Westerberg for three days, riding out with his creweach morning as the workers piloted their lumbering machines across the oceanof ripe blond grain. Before McCandless and Westerberg went their separate ways,Westerberg told the young man to look him up in Carthage if he ever needed ajob. “Was only a couple of weeks that went by before Alex showed up in town,”Westerberg remembers. He gave McCandless employment at the grain elevatorand rented him a cheap room in one of the two houses he owned. “I’ve given jobs to lots of hitchhikers over the years,” says Westerberg. “Mostof them weren’t much good, didn’t really want to work. It was a different story

with Alex. He was the hardest worker I’ve ever seen. Didn’t matter what it was,he’d do it: hard physical labor, mucking rotten grain and dead rats out of thebottom of the hole—jobs where you’d get so damn dirty you couldn’t even tellwhat you looked like at the end of the day. And he never quit in the middle ofsomething. If he started a job, he’d finish it. It was almost like a moral thing forhim. He was what you’d call extremely ethical. He set pretty high standards forhimself. “You could tell right away that Alex was intelligent,” Wester-berg reflects,draining his third drink. “He read a lot. Used a lot of big words. I think maybepart of what got him into trouble was that he did too much thinking. Sometimeshe tried too hard to make sense of the world, to figure out why people were badto each other so often. A couple of times I tried to tell him it was a mistake toget too deep into that kind of stuff, but Alex got stuck on things. He always hadto know the absolute right answer before he could go on to the next thing.” At one point Westerberg discovered from a tax form that McCandless’s realname was Chris, not Alex. “He never explained why he’d changed his name,”says Westerberg. “From things he said, you could tell something wasn’t rightbetween him and his family, but I don’t like to pry into other people’s business,so I never asked about it.” If McCandless felt estranged from his parents and siblings, he found asurrogate family in Westerberg and his employees, most of whom lived inWesterberg’s Carthage home. A few blocks from the center of town, it is asimple, two-story Victorian in the Queen Anne style, with a big cottonwoodtowering over the front yard. The living arrangements were loose and convivial.The four or five inhabitants took turns cooking for one another, went drinkingtogether, and chased women together, without success. McCandless quickly became enamored of Carthage. He liked the community’sstasis, its plebeian virtues and unassuming mien. The place was a back eddy, apool of jetsam beyond the pull of the main current, and that suited him just fine.That fall he developed a lasting bond with both the town and Wayne Westerberg. Westerberg, in his mid-thirties, was brought to Carthage as a young boy byadoptive parents. A Renaissance man of the plains, he is a farmer, welder,businessman, machinist, ace mechanic, commodities speculator, licensedairplane pilot, computer programmer, electronics troubleshooter, video-gamerepairman. Shortly before he met McCandless, however, one of his talents hadgot him in trouble with the law. Westerberg had been drawn into a scheme to build and sell “black boxes,”which illegally unscramble satellite-television transmissions, allowing people towatch encrypted cable programming without paying for it. The FBI caught windof this, set up a sting, and arrested Westerberg. Contrite, he copped a plea to asingle felony count and on October 10, 1990, some two weeks after McCandlessarrived in Carthage, began serving a four-month sentence in Sioux Falls. WithWesterberg in stir, there was no work at the grain elevator for McCandless, so onOctober 23, sooner than he might have under different circumstances, the boyleft town and resumed a nomadic existence. The attachment McCandless felt for Carthage remained powerful, however.

Before departing, he gave Westerberg a treasured 1942 edition of Tolstoy’s Warand Peace. On the title page he inscribed, “Transferred to Wayne Westerbergfrom Alexander. October, 1990. Listen to Pierre.” (The latter is a reference toTolstoy’s protagonist and alter ego, Pierre Bezuhov—altruistic, questing,illegitimately born.) And McCandless stayed in touch with Westerberg as heroamed the West, calling or writing Carthage every month or two. He had all hismail forwarded to Westerberg’s address and told almost everyone he metthereafter that South Dakota was his home. In truth McCandless had been raised in the comfortable upper-middle-classenvirons of Annandale, Virginia. His father, Walt, is an eminent aerospaceengineer who designed advanced radar systems for the space shuttle and otherhigh-profile projects while in the employ of NASA and Hughes Aircraft in the1960s and 70s. In 1978, Walt went into business for himself, launching a small buteventually prosperous consulting firm, User Systems, Incorporated. His partner inthe venture was Chris’s mother, Bil-lie. There were eight children in theextended family: a younger sister, Carine, with whom Chris was extremely close,and six half-brothers and sisters from Walt’s first marriage. In May 1990, Chris graduated from Emory University in Atlanta, where he’dbeen a columnist for, and editor of, the student newspaper, The Emory Wheel,and had distinguished himself as a history and anthropology major with a 3.72grade-point average. He was offered membership in Phi Beta Kappa but declined,insisting that titles and honors are irrelevant. The final two years of his college education had been paid for with a forty-thousand-dollar bequest left by a friend of the family’s; more than twenty-fourthousand dollars remained at the time of Chris’s graduation, money his parentsthought he intended to use for law school. “We misread him,” his father admits.What Walt, Billie, and Carine didn’t know when they flew down to Atlanta toattend Chris’s commencement—what nobody knew—was that he would shortlydonate all the money in his college fund to OXFAM America, a charity dedicatedto fighting hunger. The graduation ceremony was on May 12, a Saturday. The family sat through along-winded commencement address delivered by Secretary of Labor ElizabethDole, and then Billie snapped pictures of a grinning Chris traversing the stage toreceive his diploma. The next day was Mother’s Day. Chris gave Billie candy, flowers, asentimental card. She was surprised and extremely touched: It was the firstpresent she had received from her son in more than two years, since he hadannounced to his parents that, on principle, he would no longer give or acceptgifts. Indeed, Chris had only recently upbraided Walt and Billie for expressingtheir desire to buy him a new car as a graduation present and offering to pay forlaw school if there wasn’t enough money left in his college fund to cover it. He already had a perfectly good car, he insisted: a beloved 1982 Datsun B210,slightly dented but mechanically sound, with 128,000 miles on the odometer. “Ican’t believe they’d try and buy me a car,” he later complained in a letter toCarine,

or that they think I’d actually let them pay for my law school if I was goingto go.... I’ve told them a million times that I have the best car in the world, acar that has spanned the continent from Miami to Alaska, a car that has in allthose thousands of miles not given me a single problem, a car that I will nevertrade in, a car that I am very strongly attached to—yet they ignore what I sayand think I’d actually accept a new car from them! I’m going to have to be realcareful not to accept any gifts from them in the future because they will thinkthey have bought my respect. Chris had purchased the secondhand yellow Datsun when he was a senior inhigh school. In the years since, he’d been in the habit of taking it on extendedsolo road trips when classes weren’t in session, and during that graduationweekend he casually mentioned to his parents that he intended to spend the up-coming summer on the road as well. His exact words were “I think I’m going todisappear for a while.” Neither parent made anything of this announcement at the time, althoughWalt did gently admonish his son, saying “Hey, make sure you come see us beforeyou go.” Chris smiled and sort of nodded, a response that Walt and Billie took asan affirmation that he would visit them in Annandale before the summer wasout, and then they said their good-byes. Toward the end of June, Chris, still in Atlanta, mailed his parents a copy ofhis final grade report: A in Apartheid and South African Society and History ofAnthropological Thought; A minus in Contemporary African Politics and the FoodCrisis in Africa. A brief note was attached: Here is a copy of my final transcript. Gradewise things went pretty well and Iended up with a high cumulative average. Thankyou for the pictures, the shaving gear, and the postcard from Paris. Itseems that you really enjoyed your trip there. It must have been a lot of fun. I gave Lloyd [Chris’s closest friend at Emory] his picture, and he was verygrateful; he did not have a shot of his diploma getting handed to him. Not much else happening, but it’s starting to get real hot and humid downhere. Say Hi to everyone for me. It was the last anyone in Chris’s family would ever hear from him. During that final year in Atlanta, Chris had lived off campus in a monkishroom furnished with little more than a thin mattress on the floor, milk crates,and a table. He kept it as orderly and spotless as a military barracks. And hedidn’t have a phone, so Walt and Billie had no way of calling him. By the beginning of August 1990, Chris’s parents had heard nothing from theirson since they’d received his grades in the mail, so they decided to drive down toAtlanta for a visit. When they arrived at his apartment, it was empty and a FORRENT sign was taped to the window. The manager said that Chris had moved outat the end of June. Walt and Billie returned home to find that all the lettersthey’d sent their son that summer had been returned in a bundle. “Chris hadinstructed the post office to hold them until August 1, apparently so we wouldn’t

know anything was up,” says Billie. “It made us very, very worried.” By then Chris was long gone. Five weeks earlier he’d loaded all his belongingsinto his little car and headed west without an itinerary. The trip was to be anodyssey in the fullest sense of the word, an epic journey that would changeeverything. He had spent the previous four years, as he saw it, preparing tofulfill an absurd and onerous duty: to graduate from college. At long last he wasunencumbered, emancipated from the stifling world of his parents and peers, aworld of abstraction and security and material excess, a world in which he feltgrievously cut off from the raw throb of existence. Driving west out of Atlanta, he intended to invent an utterly new life for himself, one in which he would be free to wallow in unfilteredexperience. To symbolize the complete severance from his previous life, he evenadopted a new name. No longer would he answer to Chris McCandless; he wasnow Alexander Super-tramp, master of his own destiny.

[See Map Page 24] CHAPTER FOUR DETRITAL WASH The desert is the environment of revelation, genetically andphysiologically alien, sensorily austere, esthetically abstract, historicallyinimical.... Its forms are bold and suggestive. The mind is beset by light andspace, the kinesthetic novelty of aridity, high temperature, and wind. Thedesert sky is encircling, majestic, terrible. In other habitats, the rim of skyabove the horizontal is broken or obscured; here, together with the overheadportion, it is infinitely vaster than that of rolling countryside and forestlands... In an unobstructed sky the clouds seem more massive, sometimesgrandly reflecting the earth’s curvature on their concave undersides. Theangularity of desert landforms imparts a monumental architecture to theclouds as well as to the land.... To the desert go prophets and hermits; through deserts go pilgrims andexiles. Here the leaders of the great religions have sought the therapeuticand spiritual values of retreat, not to escape but to find reality. PAUL SHEPARD, MAN IN THE LANDSCAPE: A HISTORIC VIEW OF THE ESTHETICS OF NATURE The bear-paw poppy, Arctomecon califomica, is a wildflower found in anisolated corner of the Mojave Desert and nowhere else in the world. In latespring it briefly produces a delicate golden bloom, but for most of the year theplant huddles unadorned and unnoticed on the parched earth. A. califomica issufficiently rare that it has been classified as an endangered species. In October1990, more than three months after McCan-dless left Atlanta, a National ParkService ranger named Bud Walsh was sent into the backcountry of Lake MeadNational Recreation Area to tally bear-paw poppies so that the federal gov-ernment might better know just how scarce the plants were. A. califomica grows only in gypsum soil of a sort that occurs in abundancealong the south shore of Lake Mead, so that is where Walsh led his team ofrangers to conduct the botanical survey. They turned off Temple Bar Road, drovetwo roadless miles down the bed of Detrital Wash, parked their rigs near thelakeshore, and started scrambling up the steep east bank of the wash, a slope ofcrumbly white gypsum. A few minutes later, as they neared the top of the bank,

one of the rangers happened to glance back down into the wash while pausing tocatch his breath. “Hey! Look down there!” he yelled. “What the hell is that?” At the edge of the dry riverbed, in a thicket of saltbush not far from wherethey had parked, a large object was concealed beneath a dun-colored tarpaulin.When the rangers pulled off the tarp, they found an old yellow Datsun withoutlicense plates. A note taped to the windshield read, “This piece of shit has beenabandoned. Whoever can get it out of here can have it.” The doors had been left unlocked. The floorboards were plastered with mud,apparently from a recent flash flood. When he looked inside, Walsh found aGianini guitar, a saucepan containing $4.93 in loose change, a football, a garbagebag full of old clothes, a fishing rod and tackle, a new electric razor, a harmon-ica, a set of jumper cables, twenty-five pounds of rice, and in the glovecompartment, the keys to the vehicle’s ignition. The rangers searched the surrounding area “for anything suspicious,”according to Walsh, and then departed. Five days later another ranger returnedto the abandoned vehicle, managed to jump-start it without difficulty and droveit out to the National Park Service maintenance yard at Temple Bar. “He drove itback at sixty miles an hour,” Walsh recalls. “Said the thing ran like a champ.”Attempting to learn who owned the car, the rangers sent out a bulletin over theTeletype to relevant law-enforcement agencies and ran a detailed search ofcomputer records across the Southwest to see if the Datsun s VIN was associatedwith any crimes. Nothing turned up. By and by the rangers traced the car’s serial number to the HertzCorporation, the vehicle’s original owner; Hertz said they had sold it as a usedrental car many years earlier and had no interest in reclaiming it. “Whoa!Great!” Walsh remembers thinking. “A freebie from the road gods—a car like thiswill make a great undercover vehicle for drug interdiction.” And indeed it did.Over the next three years the Park Service used the Datsun to make undercoverdrug buys that led to numerous arrests in the crime-plagued national recreationarea, including the bust of a high-volume methamphetamine dealer operating outof a trailer park near Bullhead City. “We’re still getting a lot of mileage out of that old car even now,” Walshproudly reports two and a half years after finding the Datsun. “Put a few bucksof gas in the thing, and it will go all day. Real reliable. I kind of wondered whynobody ever showed up to reclaim it.” The Datsun, of course, belonged to Chris McCandless. After piloting it westout of Atlanta, he’d arrived in Lake Mead National Recreation Area on July 6,riding a giddy Emersonian high. Ignoring posted warnings that off-road driving isstrictly forbidden, McCandless steered the Datsun off the pavement where itcrossed a broad, sandy wash. He drove two miles down the riverbed to the southshore of the lake. The temperature was 120 degrees Fahrenheit. The emptydesert stretched into the distance, shimmering in the heat. Surrounded bychollas, bur sage, and the comical scurrying of collared lizards, McCandlesspitched his tent in the puny shade of a tamarisk and basked in his newfoundfreedom. Detrital Wash extends for some fifty miles from Lake Mead into the mountains

north of Kingman; it drains a big chunk of country. Most of the year the wash isas dry as chalk. During the summer months, however, superheated air rises fromthe scorched earth like bubbles from the bottom of a boiling kettle, rushingheavenward in turbulent convection currents. Frequently the updrafts createcells of muscular, anvil-headed cumulonimbus clouds that can rise thirtythousand feet or more above the Mojave. Two days after McCandless set up campbeside Lake Mead, an unusually robust wall of thunderheads reared up in theafternoon sky, and it began to rain, very hard, over much of the Detrital Valley. McCandless was camped at the edge of the wash, a couple of feet higher thanthe main channel, so when the bore of brown water came rushing down from thehigh country, he had just enough time to gather his tent and belongings and savethem from being swept away. There was nowhere to move the car, however, asthe only route of egress was now a foaming, full-blown river. As it turned out,the flash flood didn’t have enough power to carry away the vehicle or even to doany lasting damage. But it did get the engine wet, so wet that when McCandlesstried to start the car soon thereafter, the engine wouldn’t catch, and in hisimpatience he drained the battery. With the battery dead there was no way to get the Datsun running. If hehoped to get the car back to a paved road, McCandless had no choice but to walkout and notify the authorities of his predicament. If he went to the rangers,however, they would have some irksome questions for him: Why had he ignoredposted regulations and driven down the wash in the first place? Was he awarethat the vehicle’s registration had expired two years before and had not beenrenewed? Did he know that his drivers license had also expired, and the vehiclewas uninsured as well? Truthful responses to these queries were not likely to be well received by therangers. McCandless could endeavor to explain that he answered to statutes of ahigher order—that as a latter-day adherent of Henry David Thoreau, he took asgospel the essay “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” and thus considered it hismoral responsibility to flout the laws of the state. It was improbable, however,that deputies of the federal government would share his point of view. Therewould be thickets of red tape to negotiate and fines to pay. His parents would nodoubt be contacted. But there was a way to avoid such aggravation: He couldsimply abandon the Datsun and resume his odyssey on foot. And that’s what hedecided to do. Instead of feeling distraught over this turn of events, moreover, McCandlesswas exhilarated: He saw the flash flood as an opportunity to shed unnecessarybaggage. He concealed the car as best he could beneath a brown tarp, stripped itof its Virginia plates, and hid them. He buried his Winchester deer-hunting rifleand a few other possessions that he might one day want to recover. Then, in agesture that would have done both Thoreau and Tolstoy proud, he arranged allhis paper currency in a pile on the sand—a pathetic little stack of ones and fivesand twenties—and put a match to it. One hundred twenty-three dollars in legaltender was promptly reduced to ash and smoke. We know all of this because McCandless documented the burning of his moneyand most of the events that followed in a journal-snapshot album he would later

leave with Wayne West-erberg for safekeeping before departing for Alaska.Although the tone of the journal—written in the third person in a stilted, self-consciousness voice—often veers toward melodrama, the available evidenceindicates that McCandless did not misrepresent the facts; telling the truth was acredo he took seriously. After loading his few remaining possessions into a backpack, McCandless setout on July 10 to hike around Lake Mead. This, his journal acknowledges, turnedout to be a “tremendous mistake... In extreme July temperatures becomesdelirious.” Suffering from heat stroke, he managed to flag down some passingboaters, who gave him a lift to Callville Bay, a marina near the west end of thelake, where he stuck out his thumb and took to the road. McCandless tramped around the West for the next two months, spellbound bythe scale and power of the landscape, thrilled by minor brushes with the law,savoring the intermittent company of other vagabonds he met along the way.Allowing his life to be shaped by circumstance, he hitched to Lake Tahoe, hikedinto the Sierra Nevada, and spent a week walking north on the Pacific Crest Trailbefore exiting the mountains and returning to the pavement. At the end of July, he accepted a ride from a man who called himself CrazyErnie and offered McCandless a job on a ranch in northern California;photographs of the place show an un-painted, tumbledown house surrounded bygoats and chickens, bedsprings, broken televisions, shopping carts, oldappliances, and mounds and mounds of garbage. After working there eleven dayswith six other vagabonds, it became clear to McCandless that Ernie had nointention of ever paying him, so he stole a red ten-speed bicycle from the clutterin the yard, pedaled into Chico, and ditched the bike in a mall parking lot. Thenhe resumed a life of constant motion, riding his thumb north and west throughRed Bluff, Weaverville, and Willow Creek. At Arcata, California, in the dripping redwood forests of the Pacific shore,McCandless turned right on U.S. Highway 101 and headed up the coast. Sixtymiles south of the Oregon line, near the town of Orick, a pair of drifters in an oldvan pulled over to consult their map when they noticed a boy crouching in thebushes off the side of the road. “He was wearing long shorts and this reallystupid hat,” says Jan Burres, a forty-one-year-old rubber tramp who wastraveling around the West selling knick-knacks at flea markets and swap meetswith her boyfriend, Bob. “He had a book about plants with him, and he was usingit to pick berries, collecting them in a gallon milk jug with the top cut off. Helooked pretty pitiful, so I yelled, ‘Hey, you want a ride somewhere?’ I thoughtmaybe we could give him a meal or something. “We got to talking. He was a nice kid. Said his name was Alex. And he wasbig-time hungry. Hungry, hungry, hungry. But real happy. Said he’d beensurviving on edible plants he identified from the book. Like he was real proud ofit. Said he was tramping around the country, having a big old adventure. He toldus about abandoning his car, about burning all his money. I said, ‘Why would youwant to do that?’ Claimed he didn’t need money. I have a son about the sameage Alex was, and we’ve been estranged for a few years now. So I said to Bob,‘Man, we got to take this kid with us. You need to school him about some things.’

Alex took a ride from us up to Orick Beach, where we were staying, and campedwith us for a week. He was a really good kid. We thought the world of him. When he left, we never expected to hear from himagain, but he made a point of staying in touch. For the next two years Alex sentus a postcard every month or two.” From Orick, McCandless continued north up the coast. He passed throughPistol River, Coos Bay, Seal Rock, Manzanita, As-toria; Hoquiam, Humptulips,Queets; Forks, Port Angeles, Port Townsend, Seattle. “He was alone,” as JamesJoyce wrote of Stephen Dedalus, his artist as a young man. “He was unheeded,happy, and near to the wild heart of life. He was alone and young and wilful andwildhearted, alone amid a waste of wild air and brackish waters and theseaharvest of shells and tangle and veiled grey sunlight.” On August 10, shortly before meeting Jan Burres and Bob, McCandless hadbeen ticketed for hitchhiking near Willow Creek, in the gold-mining country eastof Eureka. In an uncharacteristic lapse, McCandless gave his parents’ Annandaleaddress when the arresting officer demanded to know his permanent place ofresidence. The unpaid ticket appeared in Walt and Bil-lie’s mailbox at the end ofAugust. Walt and Billie, terribly concerned over Chris’s vanishing act, had by thattime already contacted the Annandale police, who had been of no help. Whenthe ticket arrived from California, they became frantic. One of their neighborswas the director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, and Walt approachedthis man, an army general, for advice. The general put him in touch with aprivate investigator named Peter Kalitka, who’d done contract work for both theDIA and the CIA. He was the best, the general assured Walt; if Chris was outthere, Kalitka would find him. Using the Willow Creek ticket as a starting point, Kalitka launched anextremely thorough search, chasing down leads that led as far afield as Europeand South Africa. His efforts, however, turned up nothing—until December, whenhe learned from an inspection of tax records that Chris had given away hiscollege fund to OXFAM. “That really scared us,” says Walt. “By that point we had absolutely no ideawhat Chris could be up to. The hitchhiking ticket just didn’t make any sense. Heloved that Datsun so much it was mind-boggling to me that he would ever abandon it and travel on foot.Although, in retrospect, I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me. Chris was verymuch of the school that you should own nothing except what you can carry onyour back at a dead run.” As Kalitka was trying to pick up Chris’s scent in California, McCandless wasalready far away, hitching east across the Cascade Range, across the sagebrushuplands and lava beds of the Columbia River basin, across the Idaho panhandle,into Montana. There, outside Cut Bank, he crossed paths with Wayne Westerbergand by the end of September was working for him in Carthage. When Westerbergwas jailed and the work came to a halt, and with winter coming on, McCandlessheaded for warmer climes. On October 28, he caught a ride with a long-haul trucker into Needles,

California. “Overjoyed upon reaching the Colorado River,” McCandless wrote inhis journal. Then he left the highway and started walking south through thedesert, following the river-bank. Twelve miles on foot brought him to Topock,Arizona, a dusty way station along Interstate 40 where the freeway intersects theCalifornia border. While he was in town, he noticed a secondhand aluminumcanoe for sale and on an impulse decided to buy it and paddle it down theColorado River to the Gulf of California, nearly four hundred miles to the south,across the border with Mexico. This lower stretch of the river, from Hoover Dam to the gulf, has little incommon with the unbridled torrent that explodes through the Grand Canyon,some 250 miles upstream from Topock. Emasculated by dams and diversioncanals, the lower Colorado burbles indolently from reservoir to reservoir throughsome of the hottest, starkest country on the continent. McCandless was stirredby the austerity of this landscape, by its saline beauty. The desert sharpened thesweet ache of his longing, amplified it, gave shape to it in sere geology and cleanslant of light. From Topock, McCandless paddled south down Lake Havasu under a bleacheddome of sky, huge and empty. He made a brief excursion up the Bill WilliamsRiver, a tributary of the Colorado, then continued downstream through the Colorado River Indian Reservation,the Cibola National Wildlife Refuge, the Imperial National Wildlife Refuge. Hedrifted past saguaros and alkali flats, camped beneath escarpments of nakedPrecambrian stone. In the distance spiky, chocolate-brown mountains floated oneerie pools of mirage. Leaving the river for a day to track a herd of wild horses,he came across a sign warning that he was trespassing on the U.S. Army’s highlyrestricted Yuma Proving Ground. McCandless was deterred not in the least. At the end of November, he paddled through Yuma, where he stopped longenough to replenish his provisions and send a postcard to Westerberg in care ofGlory House, the Sioux Falls work-release facility where Westerberg was doingtime. “Hey Wayne!” the card reads, How’s it going? I hope that your situation has improved since the time welast spoke. I’ve been tramping around Arizona for about a month now. This is agood state! There is all kinds of fantastic scenery and the climate is wonderful.But apart from sending greetings the main purpose of this card is to thank youonce again for all your hospitality. It’s rare to find a man as generous and goodnatured as you are. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t met you though. Tramping is tooeasy with all this money. My days were more exciting when 1 was penniless andhad to forage around for my next meal. I couldn’t make it now without money,however, as there is very little fruiting agriculture down here at this time. Please thank Kevin again for all the clothes he gave me, I would have frozeto death without them. I hope he got that book to you. Wayne, you really shouldread War and Peace. I meant it when I said you had one of the highestcharacters of any man I’d met. That is a very powerful and highly symbolic book.It has things in it that I think you will understand. Things that escape mostpeople. As for me, I’ve decided that I’m going to live this life for some time to

come. The freedom and simple beauty of it is just too good to pass up. One dayI’ll get back to you Wayne and repay some of your kindness. A case of JackDaniels maybe? Til then III always think of you as a friend. GOD BLESS You,ALEXANDER On December 2, he reached the Morelos Dam and the Mexican border.Worried that he would be denied entry because he was carrying noidentification, he sneaked into Mexico by paddling through the dam’s openfloodgates and shooting the spillway below. “Alex looks quickly around for signsof trouble,” his journal records. “But his entry of Mexico is either unnoticed orignored. Alexander is jubilant!” His jubilance, however, was short-lived. Below the Morelos Dam the riverturns into a maze of irrigation canals, marshland, and dead-end channels, amongwhich McCandless repeatedly lost his way: Canals break off in a multitude of directions. Alex is dumbfounded.Encounters some canal officials who can speak a little English. They tell him hehas not been traveling south but west and is headed for the center of the BajaPeninsula. Alex is crushed. Pleads and persists that there must be somewaterway to the Gulf of California. They stare at Alex and think him crazy. Butthen a passionate conversation breaks out amongst them, accompanied by mapsand the flourish of pencils. After 10 minutes they present to Alex a route whichapparently will take him to the ocean. He is overjoyed and hope bursts back intohis heart. Following the map he reverses back up the canal until he comes uponthe Canal de Independencia, which he takes east. According to the map thiscanal should bisect the Wellteco Canal, which will turn south and flow all theway to the ocean. But his hopes are quickly smashed when the canal comes to adead end in the middle of the desert. A reconnaissance mission reveals,however, that Alex has merely run back into the bed of the now dead and dryColorado River. He discovers another canal about 1/2 mile on the other side ofthe river bed. He decides to portage to this canal. It took McCandless most of three days to carry the canoe and his gear to thenew canal. The journal entry for December 5 records, At last! Alex finds what he believes to be the Wellteco Canal and headssouth. Worries and fears return as the canal grows ever smaller... Localinhabitants help him portage around a barrier... Alex finds Mexicans to bewarm, friendly people. Much more hospitable than Americans... 12/6 Small but dangerous waterfalls litter the canal. 12/9 All hopes collapse! The canal does not reach the ocean but merelypeters out into a vast swamp. Alex is utterly confounded. Decides he must beclose to ocean and elects to try and work way through swamp to sea. Alexbecomes progressively lost to point where he must push canoe through reeds and

drag it through mud. All is in despair. Finds some dry ground to camp in swampat sundown. Next day, on 12/10, Alex resumes quest for an opening to the sea,but only becomes more confused, traveling in circles. Completely demoralizedand frustrated he lays in his canoe at day’s end and weeps. But then by fantasticchance he comes upon Mexican duck hunting guides who can speak English. Hetells them his story and his quest for the sea. They say there is no outlet to thesea. But then one among them agrees to tow Alex back to his basecamp [behinda small motor skiff], and drive him and the canoe [in the bed of a pickup truck]to the ocean. It is a miracle. The duck hunters dropped him in El Golfo de Santa Clara, a fishing village onthe Gulf of California. From there McCandless took to the sea, traveling southdown the eastern edge of the gulf. Having reached his destination, McCandlessslowed his pace, and his mood became more contemplative. He took photographsof a tarantula, plaintive sunsets, windswept dunes, the long curve of emptycoastline. The journal entries become short and perfunctory. He wrote fewerthan a hundred words over the month that followed. On December 14, weary of paddling, he hauled the canoe far up the beach,climbed a sandstone bluff, and set up camp on the edge of a desolate plateau.He stayed there for ten days, until high winds forced him to seek refuge in a cavemidway up the precipitous face of the bluff, where he remained for another tendays. He greeted the new year by observing the full moon as it rose over theGran Desierto—the Great Desert: seventeen hundred square miles of shiftingdunes, the largest expanse of pure sand desert in North America. A day later heresumed paddling down the barren shore. His journal entry for January 11, 1991, begins “A very fateful day.” Aftertraveling some distance south, he beached the canoe on a sandbar far from shoreto observe the powerful tides. An hour later violent gusts started blowing downfrom the desert, and the wind and tidal rips conspired to carry him out to sea.The water by this time was a chaos of whitecaps that threatened to swamp andcapsize his tiny craft. The wind increased to gale force. The whitecaps grew intohigh, breaking waves. “In great frustration,” the journal reads, he screams and beats canoe with oar. The oar breaks. Alex has one spare oar.He calms himself. If loses second oar is dead. Finally through extreme effort andmuch cursing he manages to beach canoe on jetty and collapses exhausted onsand at sundown. This incident led Alexander to decide to abandon canoe andreturn north. On January 16, McCandless left the stubby metal boat on a hummock of dunegrass southeast of El Golfo de Santa Clara and started walking north up thedeserted beach. He had not seen or talked to another soul in thirty-six days. Forthat entire period he subsisted on nothing but five pounds of rice and whatmarine life he could pull from the sea, an experience that would later convincehim he could survive on similarly meager rations in the Alaska bush. He was back at the United States border on January 18. Caught by

immigration authorities trying to slip into the country without ID, he spent anight in custody before concocting a story that sprang him from the slammer,minus his .38-caliber handgun, a “beautiful Colt Python, to which he was muchattached.” McCandless spent the next six weeks on the move across the Southwest,traveling as far east as Houston and as far west as the Pacific coast. To avoidbeing rolled by the unsavory characters who rule the streets and freewayoverpasses where he slept, he learned to bury what money he had beforeentering a city, then recover it on the way out of town. On February 3, accordingto his journal, McCandless went to Los Angeles “to get a ID and a job but feelsextremely uncomfortable in society now and must return to road immediately.” Six days later, camped at the bottom of the Grand Canyon with Thomas andKarin, a young German couple who had given him a ride, he wrote, “Can this bethe same Alex that set out in July, 1990? Malnutrition and the road have takentheir toll on his body. Over 25 pounds lost. But his spirit is soaring.” On February 24, seven and a half months after he abandoned the Datsun,McCandless returned to Detrital Wash. The Park Service had long sinceimpounded the vehicle, but he unearthed his old Virginia plates, SJF-421, and afew belongings he’d buried there. Then he hitched into Las Vegas and found ajob at an Italian restaurant. “Alexander buried his backpack in the desert on2/27 and entered Las Vegas with no money and no ID,” the journal tells us. He lived on the streets with bums, tramps, and winos for several weeks.Vegas would not be the end of the story, however. On May 10, itchy feetreturned and Alex left his job in Vegas, retrieved his backpack, and hit the roadagain, though he found that if you are stupid enough to bury a cameraunderground you won’t be taking many pictures with it afterwards. Thus thestory has no picture book for the period May 10, 1991-January 7, 1992. But thisis not important. It is the experiences, the memories, the great triumphant joyof living to the fullest extent in which real meaning is found. God it’s great tobe alive! Thank you. Thank you.

CHAPTER FIVE BULLHEAD CITY The dominant primordial beast was strong in Buck, and under the fierceconditions of trail life it grew and grew. Yet it was a secret growth. Hisnewborn cunning gave him poise and control. JACK LONDON, THE CALL OF THE WILD All Hail the Dominant Primordial Beast! And Captain Ahab Too!Alexander Supertramp - May 1992 GRAFFITO FOUND INSIDE THE ABANDONED BUS ON THE STAMPEDE TRAIL When his camera was ruined and McCandless stopped taking photographs, healso stopped keeping a journal, a practice he didn’t resume until he went toAlaska the next year. Not a great deal is known, therefore, about where hetraveled after departing Las Vegas in May 1991. From a letter McCandless sent to Jan Burres, we know he spent July andAugust on the Oregon coast, probably in the vicinity of Astoria, where hecomplained that “the fog and rain was often intolerable.” In September hehitched down U.S. Highway 101 into California, then headed east into the desertagain. And by early October he had landed in Bullhead City, Arizona. Bullhead City is a community in the oxymoronic, late-twentieth-centuryidiom. Lacking a discernible center, the town exists as a haphazard sprawl ofsubdivisions and strip malls stretching for eight or nine miles along the banks ofthe Colorado, directly across the river from the high-rise hotels and casinos ofLaughlin, Nevada. Bullheads distinguishing civic feature is the Mohave ValleyHighway, four lanes of asphalt lined with gas stations and fast-food franchises,chiropractors and video shops, auto-parts outlets and tourist traps. On the face of it, Bullhead City doesn’t seem like the kind of place thatwould appeal to an adherent of Thoreau and Tolstoy, an ideologue whoexpressed nothing but contempt for the bourgeois trappings of mainstreamAmerica. McCandless, nevertheless, took a strong liking to Bullhead. Maybe itwas his affinity for the lumpen, who were well represented in the community’strailer parks and campgrounds and laundromats; perhaps he simply fell in lovewith the stark desert landscape that encircles the town.

In any case, when he arrived in Bullhead City, McCandless stopped moving formore than two months—probably the longest he stayed in one place from thetime he left Atlanta until he went to Alaska and moved into the abandoned buson the Stampede Trail. In a card he mailed to Westerberg in October, he says ofBullhead, “It’s a good place to spend the winter and I might finally settle downand abandon my tramping life, for good. I’ll see what happens when springcomes around, because that’s when I tend to get really itchy feet.” At the time he wrote these words, he was holding down a full-time job,flipping Quarter Pounders at a McDonald’s on the main drag, commuting to workon a bicycle. Outwardly, he was living a surprisingly conventional existence, evengoing so far as to open a savings account at a local bank. Curiously, when McCandless applied for the McDonald’s job, he presentedhimself as Chris McCandless, not as Alex, and gave his employers his real SocialSecurity number. It was an uncharacteristic break from his cover that mighteasily have alerted his parents to his whereabouts—although the lapse proved tobe of no consequence because the private investigator hired by Walt and Billienever caught the slip. Two years after he sweated over the grill in Bullhead, his colleagues at thegolden arches don’t recall much about Chris McCandless. “One thing I doremember is that he had a thing about socks,” says the assistant manager, afleshy, garrulous man named George Dreeszen. “He always wore shoes withoutsocks— just plain couldn’t stand to wear socks. But McDonald’s has a rule thatemployees have to wear appropriate footwear at all times. That means shoes andsocks. Chris would comply with the rule, but as soon as his shift was over, bang!—the first thing he’d do is peel those socks off. I mean the very first thing. Kind oflike a statement, to let us know we didn’t own him, I guess. But he was a nicekid and a good worker. Real dependable.” Lori Zarza, the second assistant manager, has a somewhat differentimpression of McCandless. “Frankly, I was surprised he ever got hired,” she says.“He could do the job—he cooked in the back—but he always worked at the sameslow pace, even during the lunch rush, no matter how much you’d get on him tohurry it up. Customers would be stacked ten-deep at the counter, and hewouldn’t understand why I was on his case. He just didn’t make the connection.It was like he was off in his own universe. “He was reliable, though, a body that showed up every day, so they didn’tdare fire him. They only paid four twenty-five an hour, and with all the casinosright across the river starting people at six twenty-five, well, it was hard to keepbodies behind the counter. “I don’t think he ever hung out with any of the employees after work oranything. When he talked, he was always going on about trees and nature andweird stuff like that. We all thought he was missing a few screws. “When Chris finally quit,” Zarza admits, “it was probably because of me.When he first started working, he was homeless, and he’d show up for worksmelling bad. It wasn’t up to McDonald’s standards to come in smelling the wayhe did. So finally they delegated me to tell him that he needed to take a bathmore often. Ever since I told him, there was a clash between us. And then the

other employees—they were just trying to be nice—they started asking him if heneeded some soap or anything. That made him mad—you could tell. But he nevershowed it outright. About three weeks later, he just walked out the door andquit.” McCandless had tried to disguise the fact that he was a drifter living out of abackpack: He told his fellow employees that he lived across the river in Laughlin.Whenever they offered him a ride home after work, he made excuses andpolitely declined. In fact, during his first several weeks in Bullhead, McCandlesscamped out in the desert at the edge of town; then he started squatting in avacant mobile home. The latter arrangement, he explained in a letter to JanBurres, “came about this way:” One morning I was shaving in a restroom when an old man came in, andobserving me, asked me if I was “sleeping out.” I told him yes, and it turned outthat he had this old trailer I could stay in for free. The only problem is that hedoesn’t really own it. Some absentee owners are merely letting him live on theirland here, in another little trailer he stays in. So I kind of have to keep thingstoned down and stay out of sight, because he isn’t supposed to have anybodyover here. It’s really quite a good deal, though, for the inside of the trailer isnice, it’s a house trailer, furnished, with some of the electric sockets workingand a lot of living space. The only drawback is this old guy, whose name isCharlie, is something of a lunatic and it’s rather difficult to get along with himsometimes. Charlie still lives at the same address, in a small teardrop-shaped campingtrailer sheathed in rust-pocked tin, without plumbing or electricity, tuckedbehind the much larger blue-and-white mobile home where McCandless slept.Denuded mountains are visible to the west, towering sternly above the rooftops of adjacent double-wides. A baby-blue Ford Torino rests on blocks in theunkempt yard, weeds sprouting from its engine compartment. The ammonia reekof human urine rises from a nearby oleander hedge. “Chris? Chris?” Charlie barks, scanning porous memory banks. “Oh yeah, him.Yeah, yeah, I remember him, sure.” Charlie, dressed in a sweatshirt and khakiwork pants, is a frail, nervous man with rheumy eyes and a growth of whitestubble across his chin. By his recollection McCandless stayed in the trailer abouta month. “Nice guy, yeah, a pretty nice guy,” Charlie reports. “Didn’t like to be aroundtoo many people, though. Temperamental. He meant good, but I think he had alot of complexes—know what I’m saying? Liked to read books by that Alaska guy,Jack London. Never said much. He’d get moody, wouldn’t like to be bothered.Seemed like a kid who was looking for something, looking for something, justdidn’t know what it was. I was like that once, but then I realized what I waslooking for: Money! Ha! Ha hyah, hooh boy! “But like I was saying, Alaska—yeah, he talked about going to Alaska. Maybeto find whatever it was he was looking for. Nice guy, seemed like one, anyway.Had a lot of complexes sometimes, though. Had ‘em bad. When he left, was

around Christmas I think, he gave me fifty bucks and a pack of cigarettes forlettin’ him stay here. Thought that was mighty decent of him.” In late November, McCandless sent a postcard to Jan Burres in care of a post-office box in Niland, a small town in California’s Imperial Valley. “That card wegot in Niland was the first letter from him in a long time that had a returnaddress on it,” Burres remembers. “So I immediately wrote back and said we’dcome see him the next weekend in Bullhead, which wasn’t that far from wherewe were.” McCandless was thrilled to hear from Jan. “I am so glad to find you both aliveand sound,” he exclaimed in a letter dated December 9, 1991. Thanks so much for the Christmas card. It’s nice to be thought of this time ofyear... I’m so excited to hear that you will be coming to see me, you’rewelcome anytime. It’s really great to think that after almost a year and a halfwe shall be meeting again. He closed the letter by drawing a map and giving detailed directions forfinding the trailer on Bullhead City’s Baseline Road. Four days after receiving this letter, however, as Jan and her boyfriend, Bob,were preparing to drive up for the visit, Burres returned to their campsite oneevening to find “a big backpack leaning against our van. I recognized it as Alex’s.Our little dog, Sunni, sniffed him out before I did. She’d liked Alex, but I wassurprised she remembered him. When the dog found him, she went nuts.”McCandless explained to Burres that he’d grown tired of Bullhead, tired ofpunching a clock, tired of the “plastic people” he worked with, and decided toget the hell out of town. Jan and Bob were staying three miles outside of Niland, at a place the localscall the Slabs, an old navy air base that had been abandoned and razed, leaving agrid of empty concrete foundations scattered far and wide across the desert.Come November, as the weather turns cold across the rest of the country, somefive thousand snowbirds and drifters and sundry vagabonds congregate in thisotherworldly setting to live on the cheap under the sun. The Slabs functions asthe seasonal capital of a teeming itinerant society—a tolerant, rubber-tiredculture comprising the retired, the exiled, the destitute, the perpetually un-employed. Its constituents are men and women and children of all ages, folks onthe dodge from collection agencies, relationships gone sour, the law or the IRS,Ohio winters, the middle-class grind. When McCandless arrived at the Slabs, a huge flea market-swap meet was infull swing out in the desert. Burres, as one of the vendors, had set up somefolding tables displaying cheap, mostly secondhand goods for sale, andMcCandless volunteered to oversee her large inventory of used paperback books. “He helped me a lot,” Burres acknowledges. “He watched the table when Ineeded to leave, categorized all the books, made a lot of sales. He seemed toget a real kick out of it. Alex was big on the classics: Dickens, H. G. Wells, MarkTwain, Jack London. London was his favorite. He’d try to convince every snowbird who walked bythat they should read Call of the Wild.” McCandless had been infatuated with London since childhood. London’s

fervent condemnation of capitalist society, his glorification of the primordialworld, his championing of the great unwashed—all of it mirrored McCandless’spassions. Mesmerized by London’s turgid portrayal of life in Alaska and theYukon, McCandless read and reread The Call of the Wild, White Fang, “To Build aFire,” “An Odyssey of the North,” “The Wit of Porportuk.” He was so enthralledby these tales, however, that he seemed to forget they were works of fiction,constructions of the imagination that had more to do with London’s romanticsensibilities than with the actualities of life in the subarctic wilderness.McCandless conveniently overlooked the fact that London himself had spent justa single winter in the North and that he’d died by his own hand on his Californiaestate at the age of forty, a fatuous drunk, obese and pathetic, maintaining asedentary existence that bore scant resemblance to the ideals he espoused inprint. Among the residents of the Niland Slabs was a seventeen-year-old namedTracy, and she fell in love with McCandless during his week-long visit. “She wasthis sweet little thing,” says Burres, “the daughter of a couple of tramps whoparked their rig four vehicles down from us. And poor Tracy developed a hopelesscrush on Alex. The whole time he was in Niland, she hung around making goo-gooeyes at him, bugging me to convince him to go on walks with her. Alex was niceto her, but she was too young for him. He couldn’t take her seriously. Probablyleft her brokenhearted for a whole week at least.” Even though McCandless rebuffed Tracy’s advances, Burres makes it clear thathe was no recluse: “He had a good time when he was around people, a real goodtime. At the swap meet he’d talk and talk and talk to everybody who came by.He must have met six or seven dozen people in Niland, and he was friendly withevery one of them. He needed his solitude at times, but he wasn’t a hermit. Hedid a lot of socializing. Sometimes I think it was like he was storing up companyfor the times when he knew nobody would be around.” McCandless was especially attentive to Burres, flirting and clowning with herat every opportunity. “He liked to tease me and torment me,” she recalls. “I’dgo out back to hang clothes on the line behind the trailer, and he’d attachclothespins all over me. He was playful, like a little kid. I had puppies, and hewas always putting them under laundry baskets to watch them bounce aroundand yelp. He’d do it till I’d get mad and have to yell at him to stop. But in truthhe was real good with the dogs. They’d follow him around, cry after him, want tosleep with him. Alex just had a way with animals.” One afternoon while McCandless was tending the book table at the Nilandswap meet, somebody left a portable electric organ with Burres to sell onconsignment. “Alex took it over and entertained everybody all day playing it,”she says. “He had an amazing voice. He drew quite a crowd. Until then I neverknew he was musical.” McCandless spoke frequently to the denizens of the Slabs about his plans forAlaska. He did calisthenics each morning to get in shape for the rigors of thebush and discussed backcountry survival strategies at length with Bob, a self-styled survivalist. “Me,” says Burres, “I thought Alex had lost his mind when he told us about his

‘great Alaskan odyssey,’ as he called it. But he was really excited about it.Couldn’t stop talking about the trip.” Despite prodding from Burres, however, McCandless revealed virtually nothingabout his family. “I’d ask him,” Burres says, “ ‘Have you let your people knowwhat you’re up to? Does your mom know you’re going to Alaska? Does your dadknow?’ But he’d never answer. He’d just roll his eyes at me, get peeved, tell meto quit trying to mother him. And Bob would say, ‘Leave him alone! He’s a grownman!’ I’d keep at it until he’d change the subject, though—because of whathappened between me and my own son. He’s out there somewhere, and I’d wantsomeone to look after him like I tried to look after Alex.” The Sunday before McCandless left Niland, he was watching an NFL playoffgame on the television in Burres’s trailer when she noticed he was rootingespecially hard for the Washington Redskins. “So I asked him if he was from theB.C. area,” she says. “And he answered, ‘Yeah, actually I am.’ That’s the onlything he ever let on about his background.” The following Wednesday, McCandless announced it was time for him to bemoving on. He said he needed to go to the post office in Salton City, fifty mileswest of Niland, to which he’d asked the manager of the Bullhead McDonald’s tosend his final pay-check, general delivery. He accepted Burres’s offer to drivehim there, but when she tried to give him a little money for helping out at theswap meet, she recalls, “he acted real offended. I told him, ‘Man, you gottahave money to get along in this world/ but he wouldn’t take it. Finally I got himto take some Swiss Army knives and a few belt knives; I convinced him they’dcome in handy in Alaska and that he could maybe trade them for something downthe road.” After an extended argument Burres also got McCandless to accept some longunderwear and other warm clothing she thought he’d need in Alaska. “Heeventually took it to shut me up,” she laughs, “but the day after he left, I foundmost of it in the van. He’d pulled it out of his pack when we weren’t looking andhid it up under the seat. Alex was a great kid, but he could really make me madsometimes.” Although Burres was concerned about McCandless, she assumed he’d comethrough in one piece. “I thought he’d be fine in the end,” she reflects. “He wassmart. He’d figured out how to paddle a canoe down to Mexico, how to hopfreight trains, how to score a bed at inner-city missions. He figured all of thatout on his own, and I felt sure he’d figure out Alaska, too.”

CHAPTER SIX ANZA-BORREGO No man ever followed his genius till it misled him. Though the result werebodily weakness, yet perhaps no one can say that the consequences were tobe regretted, for these were a life in conformity to higher principles. If theday and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits afragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry,more immortal,—that is your success. All nature is your congratulation, andyou have cause momentarily to bless yourself. The greatest gains andvalues are farthest from being appreciated. We easily come to doubt if theyexist. We soon forget them. They are the highest reality... The true harvest ofmy daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints ofmorning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbowwhich I have clutched. HENRY DAVID THOREAU, VFALDEN, OR LIFE IN THE WOODS PASSAGE HIGHLIGHTED IN ONE OF THE BOOKS FOUND WITH CHRIS MCCANDLESS’S REMAINS On January 4, 1993, this writer received an unusual letter, penned in a shaky,anachronistic script that suggested an elderly author. “To Whom It MayConcern,” the letter began. / would like to get a copy of the magazine that carried the story of theyoung man (Alex McCandless) dying in Alaska. I would like to write the one thatinvestigated the incident. I drove him from Salton City Calif... in March 1992...to Grand Junction Co... I left Alex there to hitch-hike to S.D. He said he wouldkeep in touch. The last I heard from him was a letter the first week in April,1992. On our trip we took pictures, me with the camcorder + Alex with hiscamera. If you have a copy of that magazine please send me the cost of thatmagazine... I understand he was hurt. If so I would like to know how he was injured, forhe always carried enough rice in his backpack + he had arctic clothes + plenty ofmoney. SINCERELY, RONALD A. FRANZ Please do not make these facts available to anybody till I know more abouthis death for he was not just the common wayfarer. Please believe me.

The magazine that Franz requested was the January 1993 issue of Outside,which featured a cover story about the death of Chris McCandless. His letter hadbeen addressed to the offices of Outside in Chicago; because I had written theMcCandless piece, it was forwarded to me. McCandless made an indelible impression on a number of people during thecourse of his hegira, most of whom spent only a few days in his company, a weekor two at most. Nobody, however, was affected more powerfully by his or herbrief contact with the boy than Ronald Franz, who was eighty years old whentheir paths intersected in January 1992. After McCandless bid farewell to Jan Burres at the Salton City Post Office, hehiked into the desert and set up camp in a brake of creosote at the edge of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. Hard to the east is the Salton Sea, a placid ocean inminiature, its surface more than two hundred feet below sea level, created in1905 by a monumental engineering snafu: Not long after a canal was dug fromthe Colorado River to irrigate rich farmland in the Imperial Valley, the riverbreached its banks during a series of major floods, carved a new channel, andbegan to gush unabated into the Imperial Valley Canal. For more than two yearsthe canal inadvertently diverted virtually all of the river’s prodigious flow intothe Salton sink. Water surged across the once-dry floor of the sink, inundatingfarms and settlements, eventually drowning four hundred square miles of desertand giving birth to a landlocked ocean. Only fifty miles from the limousines and exclusive tennis clubs and lush greenfairways of Palm Springs, the west shore of the Salton Sea had once been the siteof intense real estate speculation. Lavish resorts were planned, grandsubdivisions platted. But little of the promised development ever came to pass.These days most of the lots remain vacant and are gradually being reclaimed bythe desert. Tumbleweeds scuttle down Salton City’s broad, desolate boulevards.Sun-bleached FOR SALE signs line the curbs, and paint peels from uninhabitedbuildings. A placard in the window of the Salton Sea Realty and DevelopmentCompany declares CLOSED/CERRADO. Only the rattle of the wind interrupts thespectral quiet. Away from the lakeshore the land rises gently and then abruptly to form thedesiccated, phantasmal badlands of Anza-Borrego. The bajada beneath thebadlands is open country cut by steep-walled arroyos. Here, on a low, sun-scorched rise dotted with chollas and indigobushes and twelve-foot ocotillostems, McCandless slept on the sand under a tarp hung from a creosote branch. When he needed provisions, he would hitch or walk the four miles into town,where he bought rice and filled his plastic water jug at the market-liquor store-post office, a beige stucco building that serves as the cultural nexus of greaterSalton City. One Thursday in mid-January, McCandless was hitching back out tothe bajada after filling his jug when an old man, name of Ron Franz, stopped togive him a ride. “Where’s your camp?” Franz inquired. “Out past Oh-My-God Hot Springs,” McCandless replied. “I’ve lived in these parts six years now, and I’ve never heard of any placegoes by that name. Show me how to get there.”

They drove for a few minutes down the Borrego-Salton Seaway, and thenMcCandless told him to turn left into the desert, where a rough 4-x-4 tracktwisted down a narrow wash. After a mile or so they arrived at a bizarreencampment, where some two hundred people had gathered to spend the winterliving out of their vehicles. The community was beyond the fringe, a vision ofpost-apocalypse America. There were families sheltered in cheap tent trailers,aging hippies in Day-Glo vans, Charles Manson look-alikes sleeping in rusted-outStudebakers that hadn’t turned over since Eisenhower was in the White House. Asubstantial number of those present were walking around buck naked. At thecenter of the camp, water from a geothermal well had been piped into a pair ofshallow, steaming pools lined with rocks and shaded by palm trees: Oh-My-GodHot Springs. McCandless, however, wasn’t living right at the springs; he was camped byhimself another half mile out on the bajada. Franz drove Alex the rest of theway, chatted with him there for a while, and then returned to town, where helived alone, rent free, in return for managing a ramshackle apartment building. Franz, a devout Christian, had spent most of his adult life in the army,stationed in Shanghai and Okinawa. On New Year’s Eve 1957, while he wasoverseas, his wife and only child were killed by a drunk driver in an automobileaccident. Franz’s son had been due to graduate from medical school thefollowing June. Franz started hitting the whiskey, hard. Six months later he managed to pull himself together and quit drinking, coldturkey, but he never really got over the loss. To salve his loneliness in the yearsafter the accident, he started unofficially “adopting” indigent Okinawan boysand girls, eventually taking fourteen of them under his wing, paying for theoldest to attend medical school in Philadelphia and another to study medicine inJapan. When Franz met McCandless, his long-dormant paternal impulses were kindledanew. He couldn’t get the young man out of his mind. The boy had said his namewas Alex—he’d declined to give a surname—and that he came from West Virginia.He was polite, friendly, well-groomed. “He seemed extremely intelligent,” Franz states in an exotic brogue thatsounds like a blend of Scottish, Pennsylvania Dutch, and Carolina drawl. “Ithought he was too nice a kid to be living by that hot springs with those nudistsand drunks and dope smokers.” After attending church that Sunday, Franzdecided to talk to Alex “about how he was living. Somebody needed to convincehim to get an education and a job and make something of his life.” When he returned to McCandless’s camp and launched into the self-improvement pitch, though, McCandless cut him off abruptly. “Look, Mr. Franz,”he declared, “you don’t need to worry about me. I have a college education. I’mnot destitute. I’m living like this by choice.” And then, despite his initial prickli-ness, the young man warmed to the old-timer, and the two engaged in a longconversation. Before the day was out, they had driven into Palm Springs inFranz’s truck, had a meal at a nice restaurant, and taken a ride on the tramwayto the top of San Ja-cinto Peak, at the bottom of which McCandless stopped tounearth a Mexican scrape and some other possessions he’d buried for safekeeping

a year earlier. Over the next few weeks McCandless and Franz spent a lot of time together.The younger man would regularly hitch into Salton City to do his laundry andbarbecue steaks at Franz’s apartment. He confided that he was biding his timeuntil spring, when he intended to go to Alaska and embark on an “ultimate ad-venture.” He also turned the tables and started lecturing the grandfatherlyfigure about the shortcomings of his sedentary existence, urging the eighty-year-old to sell most of his belongings, move out of the apartment, and live on theroad. Franz took these harangues in stride and in fact delighted in the boy’scompany. An accomplished leatherworker, Franz taught Alex the secrets of his craft; forhis first project McCandless produced a tooled leather belt, on which he createdan artful pictorial record of his wanderings. ALEX is inscribed at the belt’s leftend; then the initials C.J.M. (for Christopher Johnson McCandless) frame a skulland crossbones. Across the strip of cowhide one sees a rendering of a two-laneblacktop, a NO U-TURN sign, a thunderstorm producing a flash flood that engulfs acar, a hitchhiker’s thumb, an eagle, the Sierra Nevada, salmon cavorting in thePacific Ocean, the Pacific Coast Highway from Oregon to Washington, the RockyMountains, Montana wheat fields, a South Dakota rattlesnake, Westerberg’shouse in Carthage, the Colorado River, a gale in the Gulf of California, a canoebeached beside a tent, Las Vegas, the initials T.C.D., Morro Bay, Astoria, and atthe buckle end, finally, the letter N (presumably representing north). Executedwith remarkable skill and creativity, this belt is as astonishing as any artifactChris McCandless left behind. Franz grew increasingly fond of McCandless. “God, he was a smart kid,” theold man rasps in a barely audible voice. He directs his gaze at a patch of sandbetween his feet as he makes this declaration; then he stops talking. Bendingstiffly from the waist, he wipes some imaginary dirt from his pant leg. Hisancient joints crack loudly in the awkward silence. More than a minute passes before Franz speaks again; squinting at the sky, hebegins to reminisce further about the time he spent in the youngsters company.Not infrequently during their visits, Franz recalls, McCandless’s face woulddarken with anger and he’d fulminate about his parents or politicians or the en-demic idiocy of mainstream American life. Worried about alienating the boy,Franz said little during such outbursts and let him rant. One day in early February, McCandless announced that he was splitting forSan Diego to earn more money for his Alaska trip. “You don’t need to go to San Diego,” Franz protested. “I’ll give you money ifyou need some.” “No. You don’t get it. I’m going to San Diego. And I’m leaving on Monday” “OK. I’ll drive you there.” “Don’t be ridiculous,” McCandless scoffed. “I need to go anyway,” Franz lied, “to pick up some leather supplies.” McCandless relented. He struck his camp, stored most of his belongings inFranz’s apartment—the boy didn’t want to schlepp his sleeping bag or backpackaround the city—and then rode with the old man across the mountains to the

coast. It was raining when Franz dropped McCandless at the San Diego water-front. “It was a very hard thing for me to do,” Franz says. “I was sad to beleaving him.” On February 19, McCandless called Franz, collect, to wish him a happy eighty-first birthday; McCandless remembered the date because his own birthday hadbeen seven days earlier: He had turned twenty-four on February 12. During thisphone call he also confessed to Franz that he was having trouble finding work. On February 28, he mailed a postcard to Jan Burres. “Hello!” it reads, Have been living on streets of San Diego for the past week. First day I gothere it rained like hell. The missions here suck and I’m getting preached todeath. Not much happening in terms of jobs so I’m heading north tomorrow. I’ve decided to head for Alaska no later than May 1st, but I’ve got to raise alittle cash to outfit myself. May go back and work for a friend I have in SouthDakota if he can use me. Don’t know where I’m headed now but I’ll write when Iget there. Hope all’s well with you. TAKE CARE, ALEX On March 5, McCandless sent another card to Burres and a card to Franz aswell. The missive to Burres says, Greetings from Seattle! I’m a hobo now! That’s right, I’m riding the railsnow. What fun, I wish I had jumped trains earlier. The rails have somedrawbacks, however. First is that one becomes absolutely filthy. Second is thatone must tangle with these crazy bulls. I was sitting in a hotshot in L.A. when abull found me with his flashlight about 10 P.M. “Get outta there before I KILLya!” screamed the bull. I got out and saw he had drawn his revolver. Heinterrogated me at gunpoint, then growled, “If I ever see you around this trainagain I’ll kill ya! Hit the road!” What a lunatic! I got the last laugh when Icaught the same train 5 minutes later and rode it all the way to Oakland. I’ll bein touch, ALEX A week later Franz’s phone rang. “It was the operator,” he says, “asking if Iwould accept a collect call from someone named Alex. When I heard his voice, itwas like sunshine after a month of rain.” “Will you come pick me up?” McCandless asked. “Yes. Where in Seattle are you?” “Ron,” McCandless laughed, “I’m not in Seattle. I’m in California, just up theroad from you, in Coachella.” Unable to find work in the rainy Northwest,McCandless had hopped a series of freight trains back to the desert. In Colton,California, he was discovered by another bull and thrown in jail. Upon his releasehe had hitchhiked to Coachella, just southeast of Palm Springs, and called Franz.As soon as he hung up the phone, Franz rushed off to pick McCandless up. “We went to a Sizzler, where I filled him up with steak and lobster,” Franzrecalls, “and then we drove back to Salton City.” McCandless said that he would be staying only a day, just long enough to wash

his clothes and load his backpack. He’d heard from Wayne Westerberg that a jobwas waiting for him at the grain elevator in Carthage, and he was eager to getthere. The date was March 11, a Wednesday. Franz offered to take McCandless toGrand Junction, Colorado, which was the farthest he could drive without missingan appointment in Salton City the following Monday. To Franz’s surprise andgreat relief, McCandless accepted the offer without argument. Before departing, Franz gave McCandless a machete, an arctic parka, acollapsible fishing pole, and some other gear for his Alaska undertaking. Thursdayat daybreak they drove out of Salton City in Franz’s truck. In Bullhead City theystopped to close out McCandless’s bank account and to visit Charlie s trailer,where McCandless had stashed some books and other belongings, including thejournal-photo album from his canoe trip down the Colorado. McCandless theninsisted on buying Franz lunch at the Golden Nugget Casino, across the river inLaughlin. Recognizing McCandless, a waitress at the Nugget gushed, “Alex! Alex!You’re back!” Franz had purchased a video camera before the trip, and he paused now andthen along the way to record the sights. Although McCandless usually duckedaway whenever Franz pointed the lens in his direction, some brief footage existsof him standing impatiently in the snow above Bryce Canyon. “Ok, let’s go,” heprotests to the camcorder after a few moments. “There’s a lot more ahead,Ron.” Wearing jeans and a wool sweater, McCandless looks tan, strong, healthy. Franz reports that it was a pleasant, if hurried trip. “Sometimes we’d drivefor hours without saying a word,” he recalls. “Even when he was sleeping, I washappy just knowing he was there.” At one point Franz dared to make a specialrequest of McCandless. “My mother was an only child,” he explains. “So was myfather. And I was their only child. Now that my own boy’s dead, I’m the end ofthe line. When I’m gone, my family will be finished, gone forever. So I asked Alexif I could adopt him, if he would be my grandson.” McCandless, uncomfortable with the request, dodged the question: “We’lltalk about it when I get back from Alaska, Ron.” On March 14, Franz left McCandless on the shoulder of Interstate 70 outsideGrand Junction and returned to southern California. McCandless was thrilled tobe on his way north, and he was relieved as well—relieved that he had againevaded the impending threat of human intimacy, of friendship, and all the messyemotional baggage that comes with it. He had fled the claustrophobic confines ofhis family. He’d successfully kept Jan Burres and Wayne Westerberg at arm’slength, flitting out of their lives before anything was expected of him. And nowhe’d slipped painlessly out of Ron Franz’s life as well. Painlessly, that is, from McCandless’s perspective—although not from the oldman’s. One can only speculate about why Franz became so attached toMcCandless so quickly, but the affection he felt was genuine, intense, andunalloyed. Franz had been living a solitary existence for many years. He had nofamily and few friends. A disciplined, self-reliant man, he got along remarkablywell despite his age and solitude. When McCandless came into his world,however, the boy undermined the old man’s meticulously constructed defenses.Franz relished being with McCandless, but their burgeoning friendship also

reminded him how lonely he’d been. The boy unmasked the gaping void inFranz’s life even as he helped fill it. When McCandless departed as suddenly ashe’d arrived, Franz found himself deeply and unexpectedly hurt. In early April a long letter arrived in Franz’s post-office box bearing a SouthDakota postmark. “Hello Ron,” it says, Alex here. I have been working up here in Carthage South Dakota for nearlytwo weeks now. I arrived up here three days after we parted in Grand Junction,Colorado. I hope that you made it back to Salton City without too manyproblems. I enjoy working here and things are going well. The weather is notvery bad and many days are surprisingly mild. Some of the farmers are evenalready going out into their fields. It must be getting rather hot down there inSouthern California by now. I wonder if you ever got a chance to get out and seehow many people showed up for the March 20 Rainbow gathering there at thehotsprings. It sounds like it might have been a lot of fun, but I don’t think youreally understand these kind of people very well. I will not be here in South Dakota very much longer. My friend, Wayne, wantsme to stay working at the grain elevator through May and then go combiningwith him the entire summer, but I have my soul set entirely on my AlaskanOdyssey and hope to be on my way no later than April 15. That means I will beleaving here before very long, so I need you to send any more mail I may havereceived to the return address listed below. Ron, I really enjoy all the help you have given me and the times that wespent together. I hope that you will not be too depressed by our parting. It maybe a very long time before we see each other again. But providing that I getthrough this Alaskan Deal in one piece you will be hearing from me again in thefuture. I’d like to repeat the advice I gave you before, in that I think you reallyshould make a radical change in your lifestyle and begin to boldly do thingswhich you may previously never have thought of doing, or been too hesitant toattempt. So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will nottake the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to alife of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to giveone peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurousspirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s livingspirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounterswith new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have anendlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun. If youwant to get more out of life, Ron, you must lose your inclination formonotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life that will at firstappear to you to be crazy. But once you become accustomed to such a life youwill see its full meaning and its incredible beauty. And so, Ron, in short, get outof Salton City and hit the Road. I guarantee you will be very glad you did. But Ifear that you will ignore my advice. You think that I am stubborn, but you areeven more stubborn than me. You had a wonderful chance on your drive back tosee one of the greatest sights on earth, the Grand Canyon, something everyAmerican should see at least once in his life. But for some reason

incomprehensible to me you wanted nothing but to bolt for home as quickly aspossible, right back to the same situation which you see day after day after day.I fear you will follow this same inclination in the future and thus fail to discoverall the wonderful things that God has placed around us to discover. Don’t settledown and sit in one place. Move around, be nomadic, make each day a newhorizon. You are still going to live a long time, Ron, and it would be a shame ifyou did not take the opportunity to revolutionize your life and move into anentirely new realm of experience. You are wrong if you think Joy emanates only or principally from humanrelationships. God has placed it all around us. It is in everything and anythingwe might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against ourhabitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living. My point is that you do not need me or anyone else around to bring this newkind of light in your life. It is simply waiting out there for you to grasp it, and all you have to do is reach for it. The onlyperson you are fighting is yourself and your stubbornness to engage in newcircumstances. Ron, I really hope that as soon as you can you will get out of Salton City, puta little camper on the back of your pickup, and start seeing some of the greatwork that God has done here in the American West. You will see things andmeet people and there is much to learn from them. And you must do it economystyle, no motels, do your own cooking, as a general rule spend as little aspossible and you will enjoy it much more immensely. I hope that the next time Isee you, you will be a new man with a vast array of new adventures andexperiences behind you. Don’t hesitate or allow yourself to make excuses. Justget out and do it. Just get out and do it. You will be very, very glad that youdid. TAKE CARE RON, ALEX Please write back to: Alex McCandless Madison, SD 57042 Astoundingly, the eighty-one-year-old man took the brash twenty-four-year-old vagabonds advice to heart. Franz placed his furniture and most of his otherpossessions in a storage locker, bought a CMC Duravan, and outfitted it withbunks and camping gear. Then he moved out of his apartment and set up campon the bajada. Franz occupied McCandless’s old campsite, just past the hot springs. Hearranged some rocks to create a parking area for the van, transplanted pricklypears and indigobushes for “landscaping.” And then he sat out in the desert, dayafter day after day, awaiting his young friend’s return. Ronald Franz (this is not his real name; at his request I have given him apseudonym) looks remarkably sturdy for a man in his ninth decade who hassurvived two heart attacks. Nearly six feet tall, with thick arms and a barrelchest, he stands erect, his shoulders unbowed. His ears are large beyond the

proportions of his other features, as are his gnarled, meaty hands. When I walkinto his camp in the desert and introduce myself, he is wearing old jeans and animmaculate white T-shirt, a decorative tooled-leather belt of his own creation,white socks, scuffed black loafers. His age is betrayed only by the creases acrosshis brow and a proud, deeply pitted nose, over which a purple filigree of veinsunfolds like a finely wrought tattoo. A little more than a year after McCandless’sdeath he regards the world through wary blue eyes. To dispel Franz’s suspicion, I hand him an assortment of photographs I’d takenon a trip to Alaska the previous summer, during which I’d retraced McCandless’sterminal journey on the Stampede Trail. The first several images in the stack arelandscapes—shots of the surrounding bush, the overgrown trail, distantmountains, the Sushana River. Franz studies them in silence, occasionallynodding when I explain what they depict; he seems grateful to see them. When he comes to the pictures of the bus in which the boy died, however, hestiffens abruptly. Several of these images show McCandless’s belongings insidethe derelict vehicle; as soon as Franz realizes what he’s seeing, his eyes mistover, he thrusts the photos back at me without examining the rest, and the oldman walks away to compose himself as I mumble a lame apology. Franz no longer lives at McCandless’s campsite. A flash flood washed themakeshift road away, so he moved twenty miles out, toward the Borregobadlands, where he camps beside an isolated stand of cottonwoods. Oh-My-GodHot Springs is gone now, too, bulldozed and plugged with concrete by order ofthe Imperial Valley Health Commission. County officials say they eliminated thesprings out of concern that bathers might become gravely ill from virulentmicrobes thought to flourish in the thermal pools. “That sure could of been true,” says the clerk at the Salton City store, “butmost people think they bulldozed ‘em ‘cause the springs was starting to attracttoo many hippies and drifters and scum like that. Good riddance, you ask me.” For more than eight months after he said good-bye to McCandless, Franzremained at his campsite, scanning the road for the approach of a young manwith a large pack, waiting patiently for Alex to return. During the last week of1992, the day after Christmas, he picked up two hitchhikers on his way back froma trip into Salton City to check his mail. “One fella was from Mississippi, I think;the other was a Native American,” Franz remembers. “On the way out to the hotsprings, I started telling them about my friend Alex, and the adventure he’d setout to have in Alaska.” Suddenly, the Indian youth interrupted: “Was his name Alex McCandless?” “Yes, that’s right. So you’ve met him, then—” “I hate to tell you this, mister, but your friend is dead. Froze to death up onthe tundra. Just read about it in Outdoor magazine.” In shock, Franz interrogated the hitchhiker at length. The details rang true;his story added up. Something had gone horribly wrong. McCandless would neverbe coming back. “When Alex left for Alaska,” Franz remembers, “I prayed. I asked God to keephis finger on the shoulder of that one; I told him that boy was special. But he letAlex die. So on December 26, when I learned what happened, I renounced the

Lord. I withdrew my church membership and became an atheist. I decided Icouldn’t believe in a God who would let something that terrible happen to a boylike Alex. “After I dropped off the hitchhikers,” Franz continues, “I turned my vanaround, drove back to the store, and bought a bottle of whiskey. And then I wentout into the desert and drank it. I wasn’t used to drinking, so it made me sick.Hoped it’d kill me, but it didn’t. Just made me real, real sick.”

CHAPTER SEVEN CARTHAGE There was some books... One was Pilgrim’s Progress, about a man thatleft his family, it didn’t say why. I read considerable in it now and then. Thestatements was interesting, but tough. MARK TWAIN, THE ADVENTURES OF HUCKLEBERRY FINN It is true that many creative people fail to make mature personalrelationships, and some are extremely isolated. It is also true that, in someinstances, trauma, in the shape of early separation or bereavement, hassteered the potentially creative person toward developing aspects of hispersonality which can find fulfillment in comparative isolation. But this doesnot mean that solitary, creative pursuits are themselves pathological... [A]voidance behavior is a response designed to protect the infant frombehavioural disorganization. If we transfer this concept to adult life, we cansee that an avoidant infant might very well develop into a person whoseprincipal need was to find some kind of meaning and order in life which wasnot entirely, or even chiefly, dependent upon interpersonal relationships. ANTHONY STORR, SOLITUDE: A RETURN TO THE SELF The big John Deere 8020 squats silently in the canted evening light, a longway from anywhere, surrounded by a half-mowed field of South Dakota milo.Wayne Westerberg’s muddy sneakers protrude from the maw of the combine, asif the machine were in the process of swallowing him whole, an overgrown metalreptile digesting its prey. “Hand me that goddamn wrench, will you?” an angry,muffled voice demands from deep within the machine’s innards. “Or are you guystoo busy standing around with your hands in your goddamn pockets to be of anyuse?” The combine has broken down for the third time in as many days, andWesterberg is frantically trying to replace a hard-to-reach bushing beforenightfall. An hour later he emerges, smeared with grease and chaff but successful.“Sorry about snapping like that,” Westerberg apologizes. “We’ve been workingtoo many eighteen-hour days. I guess I’m getting a little snarly, it being so late inthe season and all, and us being shorthanded besides. We was counting on Alexbeing back at work by now.” Fifty days have gone by since McCandless’s bodywas discovered in Alaska on the Stampede Trail.

Seven months earlier, on a frosty March afternoon, McCand-less had ambledinto the office at the Carthage grain elevator and announced that he was readyto go to work. “There we were, ringing up the morning’s tickets,” remembersWesterberg, “and in walks Alex with a big old backpack slung over his shoulder.”He told Westerberg he planned on staying until April 15, just long enough to puttogether a grubstake. He needed to buy a pile of new gear, he explained,because he was going to Alaska. McCand-less promised to come back to SouthDakota in time to help with the autumn harvest, but he wanted to be inFairbanks by the end of April in order to squeeze in as much time as possible upNorth before his return. During those four weeks in Carthage, McCandless worked hard, doing dirty,tedious jobs that nobody else wanted to tackle: mucking out warehouses,exterminating vermin, painting, scything weeds. At one point, to rewardMcCandless with a task that involved slightly more skill, Westerberg attempted toteach him to operate a front-end loader. “Alex hadn’t been around machinerymuch,” Westerberg says with a shake of his head, “and it was pretty comical towatch him try to get the hang of the clutch and all those levers. He definitelywasn’t what you’d call mechanically minded.” Nor was McCandless endowed with a surfeit of common sense. Many who knew him have commented, unbidden, that he seemed to havegreat difficulty seeing the trees, as it were, for the forest. “Alex wasn’t a totalspace cadet or anything,” says Westerberg; “don’t get me wrong. But there wasgaps in his thinking. I remember once I went over to the house, walked into thekitchen, and noticed a god-awful stink. I mean it smelled nasty in there. I openedthe microwave, and the bottom of it was filled with rancid grease. Alex had beenusing it to cook chicken, and it never occurred to him that the grease had todrain somewhere. It wasn’t that he was too lazy to clean it up—Alex always keptthings real neat and orderly—it was just that he hadn’t noticed the grease.” Soon after McCandless returned to Carthage that spring, Westerbergintroduced him to his longtime, on-again, off-again girlfriend, Gail Borah, apetite, sad-eyed woman, as slight as a heron, with delicate features and longblond hair. Thirty-five years old, divorced, a mother of two teenage children, shequickly became close to McCandless. “He was kind of shy at first,” says Borah.“He acted like it was hard for him to be around people. I just figured that wasbecause he’d spent so much time by himself. “I had Alex over to the house for supper just about every night,” Borahcontinues. “He was a big eater. Never left any food on his plate. Never. He was agood cook, too. Sometimes he’d have me over to Wayne’s place and fix supperfor everybody. Cooked a lot of rice. You’d think he would of got tired of it, buthe never did. Said he could live for a month on nothing but twenty-five pounds ofrice. “Alex talked a lot when we got together,” Borah recalls. “Serious stuff, likehe was baring his soul, kind of. He said he could tell me things that he couldn’ttell the others. You could see something was gnawing at him. It was prettyobvious he didn’t get along with his family, but he never said much about any ofthem except Carine, his little sister. He said they were pretty close. Said she was

beautiful, that when she walked down the street, guys would turn their headsand stare.” Westerberg, for his part, didn’t concern himself with McCandless’s familyproblems. “Whatever reason he had for being pissed off, I figured it must havebeen a good one. Now that he’s dead, though, I don’t know anymore. If Alex washere right now, I’d be tempted to chew him out good: ‘What the hell were youthinking? Not speaking to your family for all that time, treating them like dirt!’One of the kids that works for me, fuck, he don’t even have any goddamnparents, but you don’t hear him bitching. Whatever the deal was with Alex’sfamily, I guarantee you I’ve seen a lot worse. Knowing Alex, I think he must havejust got stuck on something that happened between him and his dad and couldn’tleave it be.” Westerberg’s latter conjecture, as it turned out, was a fairly astute analysisof the relationship between Chris and Walt McCandless. Both father and son werestubborn and high-strung. Given Walt’s need to exert control and Chris’s extrava-gantly independent nature, polarization was inevitable. Chris submitted to Walt’sauthority through high school and college to a surprising degree, but the boyraged inwardly all the while. He brooded at length over what he perceived to behis father’s moral shortcomings, the hypocrisy of his parents’ lifestyle, thetyranny of their conditional love. Eventually, Chris rebelled—and when he finallydid, it was with characteristic immoderation. Shortly before he disappeared, Chris complained to Carine that their parents’behavior was “so irrational, so oppressive, disrespectful and insulting that Ifinally passed my breaking point.” He went on: Since they won’t ever take me seriously, for a few months after graduationI’m going to let them think they are right, I’m going to let them think that I’m“coming around to see their side of things “ and that our relationship isstabilizing. And then, once the time is right, with one abrupt, swift action I’mgoing to completely knock them out of my life. I’m going to divorce them as myparents once and for all and never speak to either of those idiots again as longas I live. I’ll be through with them once and for all, forever. The chill Westerberg sensed between Alex and his parents stood in markedcontrast to the warmth McCandless exhibited in Carthage. Outgoing andextremely personable when the spirit moved him, he charmed a lot of folks.There was mail waiting for him when he arrived back in South Dakota,correspondence from people he’d met on the road, including what Westerbergremembers as “letters from a girl who had a big crush on him, someone he’dgotten to know in some Timbuktu—some campground, I think.” But McCandlessnever mentioned any romantic entanglements to either Westerberg or Borah. “I don’t recollect Alex ever talking about any girlfriends,” says Westerberg.“Although a couple of times he mentioned wanting to get married and have afamily some day. You could tell he didn’t take relationships lightly. He wasn’tthe kind of guy who would go out and pick up girls just to get laid.” It was clear to Borah, too, that McCandless hadn’t spent much time cruising

singles bars. “One night a bunch of us went out to a bar over in Madison,” saysBorah, “and it was hard to get him out on the dance floor. But once he was outthere, he wouldn’t sit down. We had a blast. After Alex died and all, Carine toldme that as far as she knew, I was one of the only girls he ever went dancingwith.” In high school McCandless had enjoyed a close rapport with two or threemembers of the opposite sex, and Carine recalls one instance when he got drunkand tried to bring a girl up to his bedroom in the middle of the night (they madeso much noise stumbling up the stairs that Billie was awakened and sent the girlhome). But there is little evidence that he was sexually active as a teenager andeven less to suggest that he slept with any woman after graduating from highschool. (Nor, for that matter, is there any evidence that he was ever sexuallyintimate with a man.) It seems that McCandless was drawn to women butremained largely or entirely celibate, as chaste as a monk. Chastity and moral purity were qualities McCandless mulled over long andoften. Indeed, one of the books found in the bus with his remains was acollection of stories that included Tolstoy’s “The Kreutzer Sonata,” in which thenobleman-turned-ascetic denounces “the demands of the flesh.” Several suchpassages are starred and highlighted in the dog-eared text, the margins filledwith cryptic notes printed in McCandless’s distinctive hand. And in the chapteron “Higher Laws” in Thoreau’s Walden, a copy of which was also discovered inthe bus, McCandless circled “Chastity is the flowering of man; and what arecalled Genius, Heroism, Holiness, and the like, are but various fruits whichsucceed it.” We Americans are titillated by sex, obsessed by it, horrified by it. When anapparently healthy person, especially a healthy young man, elects to forgo theenticements of the flesh, it shocks us, and we leer. Suspicions are aroused. McCandless’s apparent sexual innocence, however, is a corollary of apersonality type that our culture purports to admire, at least in the case of itsmore famous adherents. His ambivalence toward sex echoes that of celebratedothers who embraced wilderness with single-minded passion—Thoreau (who was alifelong virgin) and the naturalist John Muir, most prominently— to say nothing ofcountless lesser-known pilgrims, seekers, misfits, and adventurers. Like not a fewof those seduced by the wild, McCandless seems to have been driven by a varietyof lust that supplanted sexual desire. His yearning, in a sense, was too powerfulto be quenched by human contact. McCandless may have been tempted by thesuccor offered by women, but it paled beside the prospect of rough congresswith nature, with the cosmos itself. And thus was he drawn north, to Alaska. McCandless assured both Westerberg and Borah that when his northernsojourn was over, he would return to South Dakota, at least for the fall. Afterthat, it would depend. “I got the impression that this Alaska escapade was going to be his last bigadventure,” Westerberg offers, “and that he wanted to settle down some. Hesaid he was going to write a book about his travels. He liked Carthage. With hiseducation, nobody thought he was going to work at a goddamn grain elevator therest of his life. But he definitely intended to come back here for a while, help us

out at the elevator, figure out what he was going to do next.” That spring, however, McCandless’s sights were fixed unflinchingly on Alaska.He talked about the trip at every opportunity. He sought out experienced huntersaround town and asked them for tips about stalking game, dressing animals,curing meat. Borah drove him to the Kmart in Mitchell to shop for some lastpieces of gear. By mid-April, Westerberg was both shorthanded and very busy, so he askedMcCandless to postpone his departure and work a week or two longer.McCandless wouldn’t even consider it. “Once Alex made up his mind aboutsomething, there was no changing it,” Westerberg laments. “I even offered tobuy him a plane ticket to Fairbanks, which would have let him work an extra tendays and still get to Alaska by the end of April, but he said, ‘No, I want to hitchnorth. Flying would be cheating. It would wreck the whole trip.’” Two nights before McCandless was scheduled to head north, Mary Westerberg,Wayne’s mother, invited him to her house for dinner. “My mom doesn’t like a lotof my hired help,” Westerberg says, “and she wasn’t real enthusiastic aboutmeeting Alex, either. But I kept bugging her, telling her ‘You gotta meet thiskid,’ and so she finally had him over for supper. They hit it off immediately. Thetwo of ‘em talked nonstop for five hours.” “There was something fascinating about him,” explains Mrs. Westerberg,seated at the polished walnut table where McCandless dined that night. “Alexstruck me as much older than twenty-four. Everything I said, he’d demand toknow more about what I meant, about why I thought this way or that. He washungry to learn about things. Unlike most of us, he was the sort of person whoinsisted on living out his beliefs. “We talked for hours about books; there aren’t that many people in Carthagewho like to talk about books. He went on and on about Mark Twain. Gosh, he wasfun to visit with; I didn’t want the night to end. I was greatly looking forward toseeing him again this fall. I can’t get him out of my mind. I keep picturing hisface—he sat in the same chair you’re sitting in now. Considering that I only spenta few hours in Alex’s company, it amazes me how much I’m bothered by hisdeath.” On McCandless’s final night in Carthage, he partied hard at the Cabaret withWesterberg’s crew. The Jack Daniel’s flowed freely. To everyone’s surprise, McCandless sat down at the piano, which he’d nevermentioned he knew how to play, and started pounding out honky-tonk countrytunes, then ragtime, then Tony Bennett numbers. And he wasn’t merely a drunkinflicting his delusions of talent on a captive audience. “Alex,” says Gail Borah,“could really play. I mean he was good. We were all blown away by it.” On the morning of April 15, everybody gathered at the elevator to seeMcCandless off. His pack was heavy. He had approximately one thousand dollarstucked in his boot. He left his journal and photo album with Westerberg forsafekeeping and gave him the leather belt he’d made in the desert. “Alex used to sit at the bar in the Cabaret and read that belt for hours onend,” says Westerberg, “like he was translating hieroglyphics for us. Each picturehe’d carved into the leather had a long story behind it.”

When McCandless hugged Borah good-bye, she says, “I noticed he was crying.That frightened me. He wasn’t planning on being gone all that long; I figured hewouldn’t have been crying unless he intended to take some big risks and knew hemight not be coming back. That’s when I started having a bad feeling that wewouldn’t never see Alex again.” A big tractor-semitrailer rig was idling out front; Rod Wolf, one ofWesterberg’s employees, needed to haul a load of sunflower seeds to Enderlin,North Dakota, and had agreed to drive McCandless to Interstate 94. “When I let him off, he had that big damn machete hanging off his shoulder,”Wolf says. “I thought, ‘Jeeze, nobody’s going to pick him up when they see thatthing.’ But I didn’t say nothin’ about it. I just shook his hand, wished him goodluck, and told him he’d better write.” McCandless did. A week later Westerberg received a terse card with aMontana postmark: APRIL 18. Arrived in Whitefish this morning on a freight train. I am makinggood time. Today I will jump the border and turn north for Alaska. Give myregards to everyone. TAKE CARE, ALEX Then, in early May, Westerberg received another postcard, this one fromAlaska, with a photo of a polar bear on the front. It was postmarked April 27,1992. “Greetings from Fairbanks!” it reads, This is the last you shall hear from me Wayne. Arrived here 2 days ago. Itwas very difficult to catch rides in the Yukon Territory. But I finally got here. Please return all mail I receive to the sender. It might be a very long timebefore I return South. If this adventure proves fatal and you don’t ever hearfrom me again, I want you to know you’re a great man. I now walk into the wild. ALEX. On the same date McCandless sent a card bearing a similar message to JanBurres and Bob: Hey Guys! This is the last communication you shall receive from me. I now walk out tolive amongst the wild. Take care, it was great knowing you. ALEXANDER.

CHAPTER EIGHT ALASKA It may, after all, be the bad habit of creative talents to invest themselvesin pathological extremes that yield remarkable insights but no durable wayof life for those who cannot translate their psychic wounds into significantan or thought. THEODORE ROSZAK, “IN SEARCH OF THE MIRACULOUS” We have in America “The Big Two-Hearted River” tradition: taking yourwounds to the wilderness for a cure, a conversion, a rest, or whatever. Andas in the Hemingway story, if your wounds aren’t too bad, it works. But thisisn’t Michigan (or Faulkner’s Big Woods in Mississippi, for that matter). Thisis Alaska. EDWARD HOAGLAND, “Up THE BLACK TO CHALKYITSIK” When McCandless turned up dead in Alaska and the perplexing circumstancesof his demise were reported in the news media, many people concluded that theboy must have been mentally disturbed. The article about McCandless in Outsidegenerated a large volume of mail, and not a few of the letters heapedopprobrium on McCandless—and on me, as well, the author of the story, forglorifying what some thought was a foolish, pointless death. Much of the negative mail was sent by Alaskans. “Alex is a nut in my book,”wrote a resident of Healy, the hamlet at the head of the Stampede Trail. “Theauthor describes a man who has given away a small fortune, forsaken a lovingfamily, abandoned his car, watch and map and burned the last of his moneybefore traipsing off into the ‘wilderness’ west of Healy.” “Personally I see nothing positive at all about Chris McCand-less’s lifestyle orwilderness doctrine,” scolded another correspondent. “Entering the wildernesspurposefully ill-prepared, and surviving a near-death experience does not makeyou a better human, it makes you damn lucky.” One reader of the Outside piece wondered, “Why would anyone intending to‘live off the land for a few months’ forget Boy Scout rule number one: BePrepared? Why would any son cause his parents and family such permanent andperplexing pain?” “Krakauer is a kook if he doesn’t think Chris ‘Alexander Su-pertramp’